After been chosen for the third year in the VMware vExpert program, the sub programs were announced yesterday.
I am very happy to have been chosen in 2 #vexpert subprograms this year: cloud management (for the second year) and Security ! Thank you to all involved and congrats to all vExperts!
If you have questions about the program or any of the products we cover, please reach out to me. My public profile is here.
VMware has been working hard to add new features to vRealize Operations (vROps), the management tool is unrecognisable from it’s origins as vCops… One of the most overlooked areas for me is compliance. It is very powerful and easy to setup.
Since I talked about vCOps … let’s get back some years to around 2012 when VMware was still actively selling a product called Configuration manager (vCM). It was a product they inherited from EMC with a heavy Windows background… It WAS a Windows program, but extremely powerful. You could make your own rule sets for testing, use the built-in ones (vSphere hardening guidelines) or buy additional ones (SoX, HIPAA, PCI,…). So it was not limited to vSPhere environments. You could for example make a rule to check anti-virus was installed on all your desktops. Or check your MS AD. or…. But it was very complex to setup… I demoed it a lot, especially in the financial world.
The last GA version of vCM is 5.8.5 which is supported until 1/2021 (sse KB), but VMware stopped bundling it with vRops Advanced and Enterprise with version 6.7. They started developing a SaaS version called vRealize Air Compliance, but with the sales of vRealize Air to OVH in 2017 the product stopped. At least I cannot find it anymore.
The good news is that Vmware started adding compliance testing to vROps 6.7 and with each version the possibilities keep improving!
Compliance is based on alert symptoms. In previous releases you had to edit the default policy to enable them… But now Compliance finally has a full-blown dashboard where you can edit the benchmarks and activate them in the policy of your choice. By default vROps includes the vSphere, NSX and vSAN hardening guidelines as benchmarks. Can you imagine ? You can enable them with one click and check your whole SDDC for security weaknesses! I cannot emphasise enough how important this is, can you keep an eye on all settings of hundreds of virtual machines with pen and paper ? Of course not. Use vROps ! On top of that you can create up to 5 of your own benchmarks (or parts of the others) to check. This is the custom benchmark pane in the middle. I will sit back down now…
Of course my homelab reflects the real world .. with a lot of compliance issues! if you click a benchmark you get to the details with triggered symptoms. From their you can decide action. What I still miss here is a ‘remedy’ or ‘action’ button like we had in vCM. Now you have to go through a lot of messages and decide on corrective action. But knowing the team this is probably coming !
And for the ‘piece de résistance’ VMware now includes all the important industry benchmarks like PCI or HIPAA for free ! You just need to download them from the dashboard and enable them. You see in my example that I enabled ISO on my SDDC.
These used to be expensive extras in Configuration Manager and now you just need to download… I hope with the new services discovery and Telegraf agents that more benchmarks are coming, operating systems for example. Maybe partners will provide the too on the Exchange.
And if all of this is not enough, you can unleash these benchmarks on your VMware Managed Cloud (VMC SDDC) environment as well of course. All from the same interface.
I hope this blog post has inspired you to test this out for yourself. Let me know how it goes and I am available for consulting if you need help. You can contact me through my website.
Register for VMware What’s New With vRealize Operations Hands-on Lab
One of the big advantages of VMware’s vRealize Operations Manager tool is plugins. It is also one of the least well known ones. Luckily with vROps 8.0 they cleaned up the admin interface. You can now quickly see which management packs have been installed and upgrade them all from one screen. It also makes it clearer which native management packs can be activated (such as the VMware MP for AWS) or which ones are no longer there (such as the VMware MP for NSX).
There are a lot of third party plugins available, especially for storage devices. You can find them in the solutions exchange (www.vmware.com/cmm) – I memorise that url as two letters before that news site ☺️. As you might know I have been working a lot with the Blue Medora plugins in the past years. I am now involved in a project however where the end user is a large Dell EMC customer and wants to use their toolset.
Dell EMC has published Storage Analytics for vROps for a number of years now. It used to be a paid solution, but since version 4.6 it is free to customers! This seems not well known yet, but you can check it in the documentation. Download, certification and documentation are available on the solutions exchange. They published a new version 5.0 that is compatible with vROps 8.0, although I also installed it on vROps 7.0! (Don’t ask…).
There is more confusion around the installation as some Dell EMC colleagues stated you need to install v4.6 first and then 5.0. That made no sense to me as each version is clearly a pak file (zipped java) with all the files and describe.xml to install the solution and dashboards and alerts. I tested it twice now, I just installed v5.0 and it worked.
Storage Analytics is a solution that can connect to most Dell EMC storage solutions: Avamar, Isilon, EMC RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines, VxFlex OS, Unity, Unity/VSA, VNX, VNXe, VMAX3, VMAX All Flash, PowerMax, VPLEX and XtremIO infrastructures in virtual or physical environments. This is a mixed blessing in my opinion. You need to install and maintain only one management pack, but it installs all dashboards for all solutions out-of-the-box. So you have some deleting to do. Before configuring any storage, you have to add separate vCenter accounts with RO users. My best guess is that they need it to build the relationships. Since my customer uses VMAX (really big ones…) I installed one instance per array as per the instructions. Again you have to keep your wits about since the fields take different values depending on your storage… I left one on Vplex (default) and it did not work of course. For VMAX you need to specify the <ip_adderss>:<port> of your Unisphere instance. This is not well documented! My config screen for an array looks like this:
After you setup the instances they start collecting data in your vROps database. This takes a while in big environments! I have also noticed that detecting the relationships can take even longer. But after a day I could see the relationship between hosts, VM, datastores and VMAX devices:
This is a standard dashboard and very helpful for troubleshooting I think. The management pack also installs symptoms and alerts of course. You might want to tweak these in policies if you get too many capacity related alerts:
And I leave you with these beautiful PowerMax overview dashboard that is included and shows everything you need to know in handy heat maps. I am even winning over storage people with these!
I have been writing documentation for some time but it has always bothered me that there has been no official Visio Stencils or Icons for the documentation of VMware solutions.
You will find in the link below Knowledge Base article with the list of VMware product names , build numbers and versions
Last week VMware published the promised new version of vROps 8.0, so as soon as the GA appeared on the website I started downloading, noblesse oblige as we say 😊. I ran the upgrade in my lab without any backups or anything. It is only a test lab after all. But I did read the release notes! I was surprised when the install stopped and said some of the requirements were not met.
I consulted KB 74952 to install the Upgrade Assesment Tool, which is a breeze in itself. Just upload the pak-file – which resides in your vROps 8.0 dir anyway – as a software update. Afterwards you can download the light support pack it created and see what was wrong. In my case I got:
Expired password ? I login each day with the password I created at install, thank you very much. I was never locked out. On a hunch I changed my password and look! The install now ran smoothly! Afterwards I saw John Dias tweet about KB 75195. So if you encounter that same problem, have a look. My install ran rather quickly, but it is a small test install with only some management packs.
I see some people complain that their install hangs or that they run into self-signed certificate issues as documented in KB 2147205. I have not seen those.
Now the Troubleshooting Workbench looks great! I launched a bad behaving VM so that I can write about the next…
Let me know if you upgraded to v8.0 and what your experience is. Of course if you run into issues you might check the VMware communities or your favourite support channel…
VMworld 2019 Europe: Operations Management Sessions
VMworld 2019 Europe will start the first week of November, and attendees tell us it’s the best place to network, get trained, and have fun! If you’re attending, we’re excited to welcome you to the conference. To make it easier, here’s a guide so you don’t miss the operations management opportunities throughout the event, including: The post VMworld 2019 Europe: Operations Management Sessions appeared first on VMware Cloud Management.
Register for VMworld 2019 Europe today. Meet experts, learn about industry hot topics, preview new hands-on labs, and attend networking events.
Because I am working on my websites and my marketing these days (see previous blog) and since I want to do some freelance writing, I was looking for my old blog at Sun. This was effectively the precursor to this independent self-hosted blog in the we-can-do-anythin-Sun-days. Amazingly it survived with me the transition to Oracle… But having left in 2012 they took it down. I guess my musings were not that interesting… I had fun with that blog though. It even once earned me an interesting exchange with our legal council. I cannot remember his name but he dressed up on “dress as a pirate day” – remember this was Sun – and is great guy. The entry was around acquisition rumours….. And if you want to find that blog you can! read on!
I wrote before about one of the greatest things on the information super highway, namely the Internet Archive. Their Wayback Machine has been indexing and storing snapshots of websites for many, many years. Look and behold they ran a few snapshots of my Oracle/Sun blog! You can see it here with all the entries…. We need to support archive.org!
