VROPS

There has been some really exciting things being announced/relased by VMware and their respective product teams recently so lets take a look at all the new goodness in vRealize Operations 8.4 vRealize Operations 8.4 vRealize Operations 8.4 delivers new and enhanced capabilities for self-driving operations to help customers optimize, plan, and scale VMware Cloud, which includes on-premises private cloud or VMware SDDC in multiple public clouds such as VMware Cloud on AWS, Azure VMware Solution (AVS), and Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE), while at the same time unifying multi-cloud monitoring, and supporting AWS, Azure Cloud, and Google Cloud platforms.

Integrating vROps with vRA 8 using Workspace One Auth Source Product Version - vRealize Automation 8.x Why integrate vROps with vRA 8? vRealize Automation can work with vRealize Operations Manager to perform advanced workload placement, provide deployment health and virtual machine metrics, and display pricing. So what is the problem? When configuring the integration, you will input the vROps URL and it will also ask you to input a username and password of the service account you wish to use.

Using vRealize Orchestreator MP in vROps Product Version - vRealize Operations 7.x and 8.x A few years ago VMware released the Orchestrator MP which is a superb way to directly call vRO workflows from vROps by way of alerts and actions. This opens the door to all manner of ideas for conditional automation using vROps. The limitation Recently for a customer we planned to use the vRO MP to assist a customer with a very unique/niche challenge.

vROps Remote Collectors - Design Considerations Product Version - vRealize Operations 7.x and 8.x As part of VMware Validated Designs tyically you would use Remote Collectors not just in different DCs but also local to the analytics cluster. However there are a circumstances where the rules “change”. When using RecoverPoint or Site Recovery Manager Design Assumption - you have Remote Collectors on your Primary Site and on your Failover Site.

vROps Cluster without a Load Balancer (gotchas) Product Version - vRealize Operations 7.5 While it is far from recomended to deploy a vROps Cluster without a loadbalancer there are circumstances where this is done. Recently helping a customer deploy a couple of simple issues cropped up that were not immediately obvious as to why they were issues. Unable to connect to Master Node when expanding the cluster We hit this issue and initialy it was a question mark moment there were no firewalls in the way and network connectivity was good end to end.

VMware have been very busy in the last few months across many of their products and Operations Management has not gone untouched. We saw glimpses of things to come late last year and now we see the Cloud Management Team in VMware really ramping things up with vRealize Operation 8.1 vRealize Operations Cloud One of the bigger items to arrive very shortly is vRealize Operations Cloud (SaaS), this means you do not need to worry about standing vROps up in your environment to see what value it can bring to your infrastructure monitoring.

I did a quick search online and could not find a collated list so, by way of a quick summary from all the VMworld 2018 announcements and comments my good friend and PM for vRealize Operations Sunny Dua has made, I have collated a list of what we can expect to see in the next iteration of vROps (7.0). The list is in no order of interest or importance, some of the mentioned improvements have been long standing requests so enjoy and get hyped (I know I am).

There are many improvements, changes and new additions to vROps in version 6.7 but one of the aspects that stands out to me personally is the direction VMware are taking with the product. Aside from the obvious addition of cloud costings and comparisons and a reworked capacity planning (from the ground up) and new hook in to Wavefront (which I really like) there has been some real effort to improve how you can further automate things from vROps.

Something that has come up with customers recently is why and when old data is cleaned up from your vROps instance. I will make the assumption that you have your data retention set to 6 months but the process is the same whether the value is less than or greater than 6 months. When data reaches and or goes beyond the age threshold set in the global settings it will be cleaned away by a daily process “Old Data Cleaner”.

In this episode, Sunny gave us a deep dive into the WLP and WLB features of vROps. We were also joined by a special guest, Jad El-Zein who gave us a great insight into how vRA utilises vROps for initial placement of freshly provisioned VMs We would highly appreciate it if you could spend 30 seconds to fill up this quick and simple survey to provide us your feedback. You can also request topics of your choice through this survey.