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. While this infrastructure is important for the IaaS provider, what business cares about is Applications. The good news is that vROps provides you an extensible platform which can be leveraged to extend the product capability into any area where metrics exist. This could be at the layers of your Software Defined Datacenter such as Compute, Network & Storage, or in the Application Stack and it’s tiers such as App, Web and DB.

If you spend a good amount of time in vROps either at your place of work or with customers (like me) you will likely  have had to create some custom XML (metric configuration) for custom dashboards.

In the past you would either use the sample/examples to get them started and then go and find the specific metric names while, this was usually quite time consuming.

In recent versions of vROps however, VMware have introduced a “builder” to help you properly format and slect the corect adapters/adapterkinds and metrics.

I already have a vRealize Orchestrator workflow to shutdown my workload cluster. What I want to do is trigger that by a voice command from Alexa.

Now, the correct and proper thing to do here would be to create a new Alexa skill, write the function in Lambda and connect that to my Orchestrator REST API and execute the workflow. That way I could control the “intents” and “utterances” and have verbal feedback.

Time to share the recording of the first episode of the vROps Webinar Series 2017. This time around, Sunny and I spoke about the latest release of vRealize Operations Manager. We spoke about almost all the new features which were introduced with this version and went into some of them in detail. Like always we rounded up the session with Live Demo of the new features for our audiences.

We introduced a feedback form which can be used to provide your feedback in general and also request topics on which you would want us to focus this year.

While there is a reasonable amount of information about how HA works in vROps I have found there is still some confusion as to how HA actually works with vROps or rather what are the benefits and perhaps more importantly the cost for enabling the feature.

HA is a great feature and in my opinion should be considered seriously with any deployment (where possible).

Not only does HA protect your Master node (which essentially behaves as an index for your vROps cluster and if lost will render your cluster dead unless you have a working backup of your cluster) it will also allow your cluster to tolerate a data node failure. So in short what is not to like!

So vROps 6.5 has been out for around a month now and I finally have a little while to write a post on what I personally really like.

There is a lot of great new enhancements and improvements added in 6.5 but for the sake of brevity I shall highlight two that I really liked.

Flexibility to increase RAM in between node sizes

So if you are familiar with vROps you will know that when you deploy it you have “T-Shirt” sizes to choose from, Small, Medium, Large and now Extra Large (6.5). However an additional extra in 6.5 is support to increase the memory allocation of your vROps nodes, you will not require additional CPU for the node until you hit the next node size bracket. If in doubt check the sizing guide spreadsheet VMware has provided so you can be sure on what you can and cannot do.

Welcome to the vRealize Operations Manager Webinar Series 2017. With the huge success of the series back in 2016, we wanted to take a break, enjoy the success and come back with full rigor for this series in 2017. We are here and we are charged up to give you some more dope on vRealize Operations manager in the year 2017.

The delivery mechanism would be same as last year. We will start with talking about a topic and then jump into a live environment to see what happens when the rubber hits the road…

In this humble consultant’s opinion, Log Insight is one of the most useful tools in the administrator’s tool belt for troubleshooting vRealize Automation. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve been asked to help troubleshoot an issue that, when asked, people don’t know which log they should be looking at. The simple fact is that vRealize Automation has a lot of log files. Correlating these log sources to provide an overall picture is a painful, manual process - unless you have Log Insight!

Over the past 6 months I have been dwelling more and more on the obvious speed of change and development in IT Infrastructure. What do I mean? Well each year there is the new hotness, the next thing/innovation you are told you need or should have.

In most cases the innovations and new tech are ground breaking awesomeness and most certainly offer new opportunities for the infrastructure masses.

I am all for progress, if you are not moving forward and regularly looking for sensible ways to improve what you do and the infrastructure you use then I really do think you are in the wrong industry.