Simon Eady

Time to announce the next part of the year long webinar series on vRealize Operations Manager. This time around, Sunny  and I thought about discussing Architecture of vROps. To some, it might sound strange as for smaller deployments you might not have to worry about Sizing and Architecture much since it is pretty simple to install and configure a small or a medium node for a small shop. However as your monitoring needs grow and you start adding solutions for monitoring data sources beyond vSphere, you would need to think about scaling up or scaling out. As your monitoring environment weaves into your incident ticketing system, you would start to see the need to HA of vROps and as you have a DR strategy for your workloads, you will start thinking about DR for your operations tools as well.

If you have used vCOps (previous version of vROPs) you will likely remember the option in the admin panel where you could change the number of metrics being collected from “balanced” to “full”.

As many found, this option drop down was not present in vROps and there appeared to be no replacement.

Here is the good news, the ability to collect those metrics has not been removed rather it’s just a little more hidden (by design)

As promised, I am posting the recording for the 4th Session of vROps Webinar Series 2016. We successfully delivered the session on Contention Based Performance & Capacity Management using vRealize Operations Manager!

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          <b><i>Session Details:- </i></b>With this instalment of the series, we have a new speaker <a href="https://twitter.com/e1_ang">Iwan Rahabok</a>, who will entertain and educate us 🙂 He is no stranger to the world of vRealize Operations Manager and has written a couple of books on vROps as well.
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          During this session we will help you understand a few basic concepts of using the right counters to monitor performance and capacity in your infrastructure. We will deep dive into the concept of the consumer and the provider layer and help you with solving issues which you might face as a provider of infrastructure to your business.
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          <b>I also want to personally thank <a href="https://twitter.com/Sunny_Dua" target="_blank">Sunny</a> & <a href="https://twitter.com/e1_ang">Iwan</a><a href="https://twitter.com/simoneady"> </a>for their continued support to this series.</b>
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          <b>Here is the recording for this session:::</b>
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          Note : It is recommended that you watch the video in HD quality for a great experience.
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So a lot of noise is being made about vROps being able to scale out and rightly so it works -very- well.

However what if you want to scale up your node or nodes, going from say small to medium?

Reasons why?

• Perhaps your POC has proved so useful you want to move it into production?
• You have lots of really useful historical on your existing smaller build and you don’t want to redeploy (therefore losing your historical data)
• You have limitations where scaling out is simply not an option but you need vROps to take on more work.

There are likely other compelling reasons for you to want to scale up your vROps nodes so lets look at how we can do that.

We hope you are having fun with the vROps Webinar Series and learning in the process!

With the next instalment of this series, we have a new speaker who will entertain us 🙂 He is no stranger to the world of vRealize Operations Manager and has written a couple of books on vROps as well. I am referring to Iwan Rahabok who has been my partner in crime on all the vROps related work which we do, inside VMware or with the community.

I think this is the first time I have written a “rant” post (for a while at least) so if you don’t want to hear me whine run away now!

In the past 12 months I think I have met more folk with Architect in their job title than I truly believe is valid. Now I will be clear this is not a slight on the individuals all of them have been exceptional (at least the ones I have had the pleasure to work with).

<img class=“alignright size-thumbnail wp-image-7206” src="/images/2016/03/aaf-logo.png" alt=“aaf-logo” width=“150” height=“150” gems deep inside, vROps in this case is not without exception.

The Automation Action Framework (AAF) is one of these, a really powerful vROps in-built automation tool.

Now when I have discussed this capability with my peers and friends many ask why not use vRO etc? My reply is quite simple, “what if you do not have vRO or the in house skills to utilise it properly?” also “With the AAF you do -not- need any scripting knowledge or have to setup any workflows.”

Session Details:-

Capacity Planning Demystified!

Capacity Planning is an integral part of vRealize Operations Manager and through this session we want to de-mystify the concepts of Capacity Planning in vROps using features such as projects and the out-of-box capacity views. We look at defining the capacity planning policies based on the business requirements of an organization

A big thank you to Rawlinson Rivera to provide all the lab equipment required for the live and thanks again to my Co-host Sunny you’re a legend!

Capacity Planning Demystified!**

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Given the flexibility in which you can choose to use and deploy vROps a question that frequently comes out is “is there a best practice?”

While that phrase is getting pretty tired it is still valid if you are just starting a design for a new vROps build or trying to make the best of a bad implementation. Rather than me trying to tell you how you should use vROps in your place of work I would direct you to a very useful PDF VMware have produced vRealize Operations Manager Reference Architecture .