Written by Simon Eady on 25/4/2017
Published under vRealize Operations
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.
Written by Sam McGeown on 6/4/2017
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.
Written by Simon Eady on 4/4/2017
Published under vRealize Operations
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.
Written by Simon Eady on 29/3/2017
Published under vRealize Operations
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.
Written by Simon Eady on 29/3/2017
Published under vRealize Operations
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.
Written by Simon Eady on 19/3/2017
Published under vRealize Operations
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…
Written by Sam McGeown on 14/3/2017
Published under VMware
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!
Written by Simon Eady on 24/2/2017
Published under Community
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.
Written by Sam McGeown on 8/2/2017
Published under Networking, NSX, VMware and vSphere
I’ve been holding off upgrading my lab to vSphere 6.5 because NSX 6.2.x doesn’t support it. With the release of NSX 6.3 and vSphere 6.5a, I can now upgrade. The sequence of the upgrade is slightly different to the generic one published by VMware because vSphere 6.5 isn’t supported with NSX 6.2. If follows that I need to upgrade NSX to 6.3 (which supports vSphere 6.0u2) before I can upgrade vSphere to 6.
Written by Simon Eady on 1/2/2017
Published under vRealize Operations
I have recently been able to get vSAN properly up and running in my lab and took a look at the OOTB Dashboards that come with the MPSD (Management Pack for Storage Devices). As I have a hybrid build (I know many have All Flash Arrays) I was interested in how hard my Flash Cache was working so I built a dashboard purely focused on this aspect of the vSAN product.