So the latest release of vROps has some cool new things and at a very high level below are the key stand out improvements and changes.

I will do a more deep dive in the next few days.

You can get the release notes here .

You can download it here .

• New home dashboard
• Improved WLP and DRS integration
• Improved Workload Dashboard
• Wizard now available for policy creation or amendment
• Improved visibility of Data collection status
• Many new Hardening policies (6.0, ESXi, vCenter, VMs, Network) and increased number of checks + reporting
• New SDDC Health Dashboards (installed as a MP)
• New Self services dashbaords (vROps)
• Improved UI/UX Visuals
• Heatmap improvements
• Improved dashboards (free widget layout)
• New Widget (recommended actions)
• Improved Log insight integrations (3.6 vLI)

This time around Iwan Rahabok will lead the next session of the vROps Webinar Series while Sunny and myself will support him to deliver some awesome content which Iwan has developed over the past few months.

Yes, this time around we will move our focus from vROps as a Product and related features to the concept of running your SDDC operations with vRealize Operations Dashboards. Just to clarify, this is not a session where we will teach you to create dashboards, but this is a session where we would share how a set of Customised Dashboards can help any organisation’s IT to get an insight into Storage, Network & Compute within your SDDC. While vROps is primarily a Performance Management and Capacity Planning tool, we will take you to the other important aspects as well such as Availability and Configuration.

Time to release the recording for the latest part of the vROps Webinar Series. We completed the 7th session of the series where we spoke about vRealize Operations Manager Alerts and Symptoms.

Alerts as we all know would always remain the heart and soul for the operations teams to run the data centers, whether old school or the modern software defined.

In all cases you need alerts and more importantly you need meaningful and actionable alerts. In this part of the series, Simon and myself concentrated on making you aware of the alert constructs in vROps and as usual share experiences around how we help customers leverage the strong feature set of vROps to customize alerts and related symptoms, recommendations and actions to drastically reduce the Mean Time to Resolution of issues.

Although it’s fairly limited, you can add AWS as an endpoint for vRealize Automation 7  and consume EC2 AMIs as part of a blueprint. You can even add the deployed instances to an existing Elastic Load Balancer at deploy time. In this post I’ll run through the basics to get up and running and deploy your first highly available (multiple Availability Zone, load balanced) blueprint.

Preparing AWS for use as a vRA endpoint

There are some obvious pre-requisites for attaching an AWS endpoint - for example, you need to have a VPC configured. There are plenty of resources out there for creating a VPC, so I won’t extend this post by replicating them. This is what I’m using:

Time to announce the next part of the year long webinar series on vRealize Operations Manager. With the last part of the series, we started focusing on content withing vROps. We will continue the trend and talk about a major function of vROps a.k.a Alerts. Alerts is the most used and most ab-used part of vROps, and with this session we want to give you some insights on the entire life-cycle of the alerting function of vROps.

In my post yesterday I promised to post my VMworld session picks, so here it is! I have filled my schedule, and even added some alternate picks when there were too many good sessions to go for. My session picks are focussing around:

• vRealize Automation
• NSX
• VSAN
• PowerCLI, APIs and automation

Now, before anyone tells me I’ve picked too many and I won’t make it to all of them - I know! I can guarantee I’ll get distracted/tired/hungry and won’t make all of them, but if I could…

I’m not sure if I’ll take advantage of the cheap certifications this year - in previous years I’ve take VCIX-NV , VCP-NV and VCAP5-DCD all with great results, so it’s something I’d consider, although at this point I’m not 100% sure what exam I’d take (I’ve done a lot of betas recently!)

Time to announce the next part of the year long webinar series on vRealize Operations Manager. This time around, Sunny  and I will take you to the world of Content within vROps. I will be honest in saying that this is an ocean in itself and we might not be able to touch upon all the aspects of developing content within vROps. During this effort we plan to start with giving you an overview of the various options available to develop content within vROps.

So recently a few folk whom I respect a great deal posted up their top 10 albums of all time, initially I was like, OK, but having gone through the exercise myself I found it really enjoyable. Sure its quite self indulgent but seeing other people’s lists gives you a small glimpse into their life. After all musical taste is a hugely personal thing.

I approached my top 10 by considering which bands and albums had the biggest impact on me at a given time in my life and that I still enjoy today. It was kinda cool to go through my own play lists and see what “oldies” cropped up still in my current playlists of which I listen to on a regular basis.