vROps Webinar Series 2016 is back and as promised during the last session we would now take you to the world of vRealize Operations Policies Policies.

What is a Policy??

“A policy is a deliberate system of principles to guide decisions and achieve rational outcomes. A policy is a statement of intent, and is implemented as a procedure or protocol”

Source - Wikipedia

While the role of vRealize Operations Manager is to help you with Performance & Capacity Management of your Software Defined Datacenter (SDDC), it is important that you feed in the guiding principles of your Business Environment into vROps to get the rational outcomes. These outcomes span across Health, Risk & Efficiency of your SDDC environment.

As you will see the upgrade is simple and even though its early days I haven’t seen anything that has been broken!

If you are interested in seeing an example of the new utilization dashboard scroll to the bottom of this article.

Upgrading from 6.1

I will be doing this upgrade on a VA so to begin with I will need the vRealize Operations Manager - Virtual Appliance Operating System upgrade .pak file (Realize_Operations_Manager-VA-OS-6.2.0.3445569.pak)

vRealize Operations 6.2 was released last night and is now available for download!

Looking at what’s new very quickly there are some good new enhancements but when you compare this to the 6.1 release it’s perhaps a little light, nevertheless there appears to be some new cool features and enhancements to be had in this version.

There does not appear to be any sizing/scale increases.

Upgrading from existing 6.1 versions can be done via a .pak file.

For the last few months and certainly very recently (at the London VMUG meeting) I have had the chance to talk to peers and #vExperts and share “war stories” with regards to vRealize Operations Manager.

What has become a consistent theme in all the stories is just how much compute resources vROps requires when you “go big” and not just what is clearly defined in the sizing spreadsheet.

For example some of the large deployments I have either been involved in or heard about (to monitor upwards and beyond of 30000 VMs) required the deployment of Large vROps nodes.

A series of webcasts on vRealize Operations Manager 6.x, helping you learn about anything and everything about the solution. Some of the examples include, vROps Policies, Alert Definitions, Automated Action Framework, integration to third party etc. This would include power point and live demonstrations. The session would range anywhere between 60 to 90 minutes.

With 100+ registrations and more than 70 live attendees, it was definitely a great start to this series. On popular demand of many who could not attend the session due to time-zone differences, we have recorded the session and you can watch the same right here. It is recommended that you watch the video in HD quality for a great experience.

If you use the in-built vRealize Orchestrator instance shipped with the vRealize Automation appliance then you might run into this issue when working with the REST client:

Connection pool shut down (Workflow:Get-IdentityToken / Scripting (item3)#14)

The vRA appliance version I have (6.2 - note to self, need to update lab!) includes the plugin version 1.0.4 for REST. According to the release notes, this was fixed in 1.0.5 - typical!

So if you are already familiar with vROps you will know you can now have multiple nodes in your cluster.

• 8 nodes if you are on versions 6.0.x
• 16 nodes if you are on version 6.1

Why does this matter if you plan to use SNMP with your vROps cluster?

Quite simple really, what I discovered today is that even though you have a master node SNMP traps can and will be sent from all of the nodes to the destination you have configured.

This was my second UKVMUG and it was my first vCurry evening! so I was really looking forward to getting up to the event and seeing everyone.

The vCurry event was excellent and it was a great chance to enjoy good food in great company. Had the chance to meet with many people I would not normally get the chance to see, Frank @fbuechsel and Brad @VMUG_CEO to name a couple! To top off a really great evening we (my table/team) won the vQuiz which was organised and conducted by Stuart @Virtual_Stu (thanks Stuart!), a big thank you to Matt @Twickersmatt for the beers (one of the prizes).

First of all, thank you to everyone who came along to my session at the UKVMUG yesterday, it was great to see so many people at a round table discussion, sorry for those that had to stand! I hope that it was helpful and maybe a few of you will be building some awesome labs in the cloud!

Ravello very kindly sponsored a free home lab, equivalent to the vExpert 1000 hours account as a prize for my session at the UKVMUG yesterday. Using a high tech random number generator and an Excel spread sheet the winner was picked, so without further ado, congratulations go to…