Blue Medora supports vRealize Operations v6.7!

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Good news if you saw the announcement of VMware vRealize Operations v6.7 yesterday. We worked hard with VMware so that all our management packs are ready for use with this new version! The capacity planning engine has been overhauled a lot, so we wrote a KB article to explain the differences.

HPE 3PAR capacity dashboard

HPE 3PAR capacity dashboard

Blue Medora product management have published a partial list of latest versions to use. These also include other updates. The list is not complete yet, but more will follow. For a documentation and data sheets see the product matrix and contact sales there for a demo and trial or email sales@bluemedora.com.

  1. Apache Hadoop (1.1.0.20180322.151724) 
  1. Cisco UCS (3.1.1.20180405.024250) 
  1. Cohesity (1.1.0.20180316.141936) 
  1. Dell PowerEdge (1.2.0.20180404.144806) 
  1. KVM (1.1.0.20180315.202846) 
  1. Lenovo Compute (1.1.0.20180404.154614) 
  1. MEDITECH (1.3.0.20180312.164522) 
  1. Microsoft Azure (1.1.0.20180326.154253) 
  1. Microsoft SCOM (2.1.0.20180316.174713) 
  1. MongoDB (1.1.0.20180316.142042) 
  1. MySQL (2.1.0.20180316.205435) 
  1. NetApp E-Series (1.1.0.20180320.142233) 
  1. Nutanix (1.1.0.20180330.192826) 
  1. Oracle Database (1.2.0.20180319.144115) 
  1. Oracle Enterprise Manager (4.1.0.20180319.192845) 
  1. Pivotal Cloud Foundry (3.1.0.20180316.195000) 
  1. SAP (2.3.0.20180321.155955) 
  1. SAP HANA (2.1.0.20180319.134350) 
  1. SolarWinds (1.1.0.20180316.145743) 
  1. Xen Hypervisor (1.1.0.20180315.203013) 

vRO plugin for HPE 3PAR StoreServ released !

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Blue Medora has released another vrO plugin to help you manage your infrastructure!

Our initial release of a plug-in for HPE 3PAR StoreServ is now generally available.
 
Notable Features Include:
  • A comprehensive Create Datastore workflow that does all the heavy-lifting of provisioning HPE 3PAR StoreServ storage for vCenter
  • 9 additional out-of-the-box workflows for common 3PAR StoreServ administrative tasks, including:
    • Create/Delete Host
    • Create/Delete Volume
    • Create/Delete LUN
  • Exposed WSAPI methods for creating your own custom workflows
  • The ability to import and manage your entire HPE 3PAR StoreServ environment in vRO
More details coming soon, visit www.bluemedora.com for more details!

Moving clouds.. with Docker

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The driving force in IT for me has always been commoditization. There is probably another blog post here, but we moved from the Bios to the processor, to storage and the network. Everything becomes a commodity at some point, or do you still care what BIOS version your server has? If you still have a server?

In 2008 I attended a CloudCamp where people were asking vendors: “but how do I move workloads between cloud providers?”. Of course there was no answer because public cloud was not a commodity back then, it was just an emerging tech and they all wanted to monetize. Compare your AWS prices from back then to now if you don’t believe me…

Today I realize that containers are making cloud a commodity finally. It does not matter if you run your Docker containers in AWS or Azure or other cloud services. The apps and services remain the same. With Docker Enterprise Edition – the vCenter of Docker – you can manage them all from one pane. I realized that even more with the announcement of IBM Cloud support in Docker EE in the keynote this morning. So now you have AWS, Azure and IBM cloud support built-in for your swarm clusters (and soon kubernetes). Google cloud is experimental at the moment I understand. I played around with Docker for Mac CE deploying a swarm to AWS and I must say the experience is seemless.

So there you go: when all your apps run in containers, they can be moved around on different clouds or even run on different ones in one stack!

So where is the ‘spiel’ now you ask? In added services from those cloud providers. IBM showed in the keynote adding image recognition and Watson lookup in a traditional pet store app. Watson, Alexa and the likes are the proprietary differentiators now. For a next blog…

New MySQL management pack release from @bluemedora

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The MySQL management pack for VMware vRealize Operations Manager is one of the most populair ones at Blue Medora. It gives you monitoring of your MySQL 5.6.x and 5.7.x databases -including queries – and capaciteit planning, right Inside vROps. The latest release of vRealize Operations MP for MySQL is now generally available.
https://bluemedora.com/downloads/vrops_mp_for_mysql

As with all Blue Medora management packs, the dashboard above shows you that we detect all relations from the database to the VM and beyond. Notable Features in this Release Include:
• Implemented overall performance improvements and query optimization
• Removed MySQL on OS, MySQL IOPS, MySQL on VM, and MySQL Top-N Queries Dashboards
• Added MySQL Usage, MySQL Query Analysis, and MySQL on VMware Dashboards
• Removed Memory Capacity for MySQL instances 
• Added new Views and Reports

As with all new releases it includes the great new HTML Documentation.

Important! With this product we have implemented the new versioning scheme, which removes the “6.x” signifier tied to the minimum supported vROps version. The official build number for this release that will be listed in our documentation is 2.0.0.20170719.200055

• Version number:
◦ “2” is the major version.
◦ “0” is the minor version.
◦ “0” is the patch version.
• Build number:
◦ “20170719” is the build date (YYYYMMDD).
◦ “200055” is the build time (hhmmss).

Ransomware…

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After 30 odd years in IT it still amazes me people will not take care of basic protection in their environments. Security settings, patches, anti-virus. Nope. Even after previous ransomware attacks this one is still successful. Even in big corporations.

And please don’t go the “it won’t happen on my Mac/ Linux/ TRS-80 machines” way. You know it is coming … Some environments are more secure like Mac OS with sandbox and just not running Windows file sharing, but attacks are more and more ingenious. Even your Intel processor has built-in risks and it takes just a link in an email. Yes I know you were just curious about that viagra ad and did not really intended to order…

Get some basic discipline and IT-hygiene ! That is the real issue. 

New management packs for Citrix, JBoss EAP and Apache Tomcat

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Overnight Blue Medora released some great new and improved management packs for VMware vRealize Operations Manager. As always the advantages include full API support – no agents to install – relationships detection across solutions and some great dashboards to get you started included with every solution.

Citrix Xen Desktop (build 6.2.10202006)

This is an important new release since VMware decided to drop support for Windows remote collectors in vRealize Operations v6.5.  Updates Include (from release notes):

  • Removed Windows Collector requirement for PowerShell metric retrieval (i.e., session latency metrics; not applicable to XenDesktop versions 7.5 and below)
  • Added support for WinRM HTTPS
  • Renamed Citrix XenDesktop Relationships dashboard to Citrix XenDesktop Health Investigation
  • Combined Application Details and Desktop Details dashboards into single Citrix XenDesktop App and Desktop Details dashboard
  • Deprecated Inactive User property string metrics

The great new html documentation is available.

JBoss EAP (build 6.3.10100004)

JBoss and Tomcat are new products, inline with our expanding True Visibility Suite offering, to monitor your application servers in the full stack. Key Features include (from release notes):

  • 4 comprehensive monitoring dashboards, including:
    • JBoss EAP Overview
    • JBoss EAP Environment Overview
    • JBoss EAP Server
    • JBoss EAP Virtual Machine Viewer
  • Nearly 150 collected metrics for JBoss EAP resources
  • Key performance metrics such as average response time, active connection count, wait count, percent in use, and active sessions
  • Detailed alerts when symptoms arise for high JVM usage, datasource wait count/active connections, servlet processing time, and more
  • vRealize Calculated Memory, Connection, Thread, and Session capacity definitions for JBoss EAP resources

See documentation for further details and installation. JBoss EAP is licensed per Application Server – or as part of the TVS Enterprise suite – and is supported on Enterprise Edition of vRealize Operations.

Apache Tomcat (build 6.3.10100007)

Key Features include ( (from release notes):

  • 4 comprehensive monitoring dashboards, including:
    • Apache Tomcat Overview
    • Apache Tomcat Environment Overview
    • Apache Tomcat Server
    • Apache Tomcat Virtual Machine Viewer
  • 200+ collected metrics for Apache Tomcat resources
  • Key performance metrics such as average response time, active connection count, wait count, percent in use, and active sessions
  • Detailed alerts when symptoms arise for high servlet load time, datasource/session manager active sessions, cache hit count, and more
  • vRealize Calculated Memory, Cache, Threading, and Session Manager capacity definitions for Apache Tomcat resources

See documentation for further details and installation. Apache Tomcat is licensed per Webserver – or as part of the TVS Enterprise suite – and is supported on Enterprise Edition of vRealize Operations.

Visit Blue Medora at VMUG NL UserCon !

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The biggest VMUG UserCon is in two weeks in Den Bosch, the Netherlands. The event itself is highly recommended with around 1000 participants, a lot of sessions and vendors to interact with. You can consult the agenda here.

Blue Medora is a Silver sponsor, we will have a booth and my colleagues and me will be glad if you stop by for a chat or a demo and maybe you win a prize !

Register for attendance here.

New Nagios Management Pack for vROps

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The first release of our vRealize Operations Management Pack for Nagios is now generally available!
I forgot to mention this one, although I am really excited about it! It was written for a big account of mine here in EMEA. When I was still at VMware, I had a customer who tested the first version of this adapter to import NTP time information from linux servers in vCOps. That version used Perl to import RRD-files from Nagios in vCOps with the text file adapter. Things have evolved since then…. At Blue Medora our Nagios management pack connects to the Nagios XI monitoring platform, bringing in Host Groups, Hosts, Service Groups and Services and connecting them to related VMware objects. So you will need the commercial version of Nagios, the reason is that we need a stsable API to connect to…
 Nagios dashboard

Major features:
• 6 comprehensive monitoring dashboards.
• 5 high-level views—and 2 corresponding reports — including right sizing information over the last 30 days for CPU, Disk, and Memory used per host.
• 170+ collected metrics for Nagios resources.
• Key performance metrics such as System Memory, System CPU, System Disk, Host Memory, Host CPU, and Host Disk.
• Detailed alerts and notifications imported from the Nagios API.
• Capacity definitions for vRealize Calculated CPU Capacity, Disk Capacity, and Memory Capacity.

So why would you use this next to your Nagios deployment? Here are some reasons:

  • Centralize information in easy to use dashboards for the whole enterprise.
  • capacity calculations !
  • Automatic relationships to VMware objects.

As always you can consult the product page to get more info and a demo. The management pack is available standalone or in the TVS Suite Enterprise or Manager-of-Managers True Visibility Suite pack. This is a great collection of management packs to connect Oracle Enterprise Manager, MS SCOM, IBM Tivoli, Solarwinds and Nagios to vRealize Operations. Some customers use three of these connectors at the same time !

All technical documentation is on the support portal.