Having missed last years VMworld I feel very ready for attending the EMEA VMworld in Barcelona. I almost felt annoyed about missing last year as the big announcements really caused a stir in the community and wider afield. (VMware on AWS) The announcements from the US VMworld this year were equally exciting so I am very keen to hear what else VMware has planned to reveal in a Barcelona. I have put a good deal of effort into planning what I will be doing and attending to maximise my time there without burnout (Veterans I hear you laughing)

[vRealize Operations Manager 6.6, which was recently released by VMware. We started with an overview of all the cool new stuff and then drill down into individual areas. We then jumped into a Live Demo as usual to see the new features in action. We would highly appreciate if you could spend 30 seconds to fill up this quick and simple survey to provide us your feedback. You can also request topics of your choice through this survey.

As a consultant I’ve had the opportunity to design, install and configure dozens of production vRealize Automation deployments, from reasonably small Proof of Concept environments to globally-scaled multi-datacenter fully distributed behemoths. It’s fair to say, that I’ve made mistakes along the way - and learned a lot of lessons as to what makes a deployment a success. In the end, pretty much everything comes down to getting the pre-requisites right. Nothing that I’ve written here is not already documented in the official documentation, and the installation wizard does a huge amount of the work for you.

I’ve been working for Xtravirt for over 3 and a half years now, first as a Senior Consultant, and more recently as a Lead Consultant. During that time I’ve had the opportunity to work with some excellent people, some fantastic customers and some huge projects. I’ve developed and grown as a consultant and architect, achieved multiple VCP and VCAP qualifications, and VMware’s elite VCDX certification. For all of this, and for the opportunities and support they have provided, I am thankful to Xtravirt and to all of my colleagues who helped along the way.

Welcome to the next episode of vRealize Operations Manager Webinar Series. This time around we will talk about the latest release of vROps released in the month of June. With this release, VMware has made drastic changes to the product and the initial reviews of the product have been great. Since I was a part of the team delivering this new release, I thought it would be a good topic to discuss in the next episode of the Webinar Series.

The Host Resources Deep Dive book by Frank Denneman and Niels Hagoort has been one of the most widely anticipated books in the VMware community - previous deep dive books by Frank (co-authored with Duncan Epping), tantalising blog posts and captivating presentations have whet the appetite for the last year or so. Having sat through some of these presentations at VMUGs and VMworld I can tell you the depth and understanding that the authors bring to the table is immense.

With the release of vSphere 6.5, VMware upped the game for vCenter High Availability (vCHA) and introduced an active/passive/witness cluster setup to provide a failover cluster for vCenter Server Appliances. The diagram below shows the architecture of the solution. Deploying vCHA can be done in two modes - “Basic” and “Advanced”. You can use Basic mode if the vCenter you want to be HA is managing the hosts it resides on - in this scenario the wizard configures your vCenter and deploys the Passive and Witness nodes for you.

[<img class=“alignright size-thumbnail wp-image-8035” src="/images/2017/03/logo.jpg" alt="" width=“150” height=“150” which vROps can provide by using various extensibility solutions. We discussed the following use cases and demonstrated them in live environments: Use Case 1 - Full-Stack vSphere Monitoring. From application to Infrastructure. Use Case 2 - Amazon RDS Workloads. Monitoring public cloud workloads with vROps. Use Case 3 - vROps Extensibility. Metrics, Logs and Costing come together along with other 3rd party extensibility options.

So very recently i had a great question from a customer regarding ways to monitor things like the temperature of host systems. Would they need a management pack or is this something vROps can do out of the box? The short answer to this is yes, but it is not immediately obvious how. There are a great many metrics that come with a vanilla build of vROps but not all of them are enabled a good example of these are the sensor metrics.

As promised, vROps Webinar Series 2017 is back with the second episode of the year. Last time around we looked closely into the features of vROps 6.5 and as stated during that webinar, we will now show you how you can unlock the full capabilities of vROps using the extensibility of the platform. If you have been following the Webinar Series, by now you have a complete visibility into the capabilities of vROps, when it comes to monitoring the vSphere infrastructure.