My blogpost for Blue Medora has just been posted to the VMware cloud management blog. Have a look !
vRealize Operations in a (hyper)converged world
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Tag Archives: vR Ops
Resources to learn vRealize Operations Manager
Last week I was visiting a customer and quickly realized they had an issue that could be solved with custom groups and a dashboard. The customer was starting out with vROps and had no idea. It is sometimes difficult to find resources – outside of the tranings – to get familiar with vROps in your day-to-day job. Since I was also gathering info for a Blue Medora blog post on polcies I am writing, I quickly updated my resource page with these great resources:
- VMware feature walkthrough videos: A little known tool that has extensive demos of several recent products. The main page list some topics like NSX and vSAN, but of particular interest to us is the vSOM page. A lot of details, including info on policies. A lot of it is pertinent to vROps advanced and enterprise too.
- The book “VMware vRealize Operations Essentials” by Matt Steiner. Matt is a cloud specialist for VMware UK and an overall great guy. Available on Safari Booksonline or Pakt Publishing.
- The book “VMware Performance and Capacity Management” – Second Edition (!) by Iwan ‘E1’ Rahabok. Again a great VMware colleague in Singapore this time, who is a master of capacity planning… Available on Safari Booksonline or Pakt Publishing.
Hope this helps you in your work with vROps !
A new challenge ! With Blue Medora !
Well, I have been quiet on the blog, I will not hide from you that the 3 months following my forced exit from VMware have not been easy on a number of fronts (like my dog dying a month later…), but outplacement training has been a great help to me.
I am therefore more than happy to announce that today is my first workday for Blue Medora ! If you do not know this great company yet – and you should ! – we make all those great management packs that extend VMware vRealize Operations to manage more than your VMware virtualisation layer: NetApp and Nimble storage, Cisco Nexus and UCS platforms, Microsoft SQL Server and SAP HANA,… So it is not only on the hardware level, but also applications. And we also make plugins for Oracle Enterprise Manager and New Relic. Find an overview here.
I will be solutions architect for Europe, working as a contractor, since we are starting up in Europe. But business is booming, especially now that VMware resells some of the management packs and transferred development of some to Blue Medora !
What is especially great for me is that this allows me to continue with VMware vRealize Operations, the platform I know and love, and continue to evangelise it !
Visit me VMware booth #VMworld
If you want to check out the new vRealize Operations Manager 6.1 or vSphere with Operations Management (vSOM) or LogInisght v3.0, come and visit my colleagues and me at the VMware booth in the Solutions Exchange at VMworld Barcelona !
I am here today – Wednesday – till 19h00 and tomorrow morning – Thursday – 10h30 till 13h30.
Hope you are stopping by for a demo !
My session on vROps 6 at #vmugbe tomorrow
I am happy that my session proposal got accepted last minute for the VMUG meeting tomorrow in Antwerpen. Here is the proposal:
vRealize Operations: A few ins and a lot of outs.
vRealize Operations v6 has been out six months now. Apart from a name change, there have been a lot of changes under the hood and in the GUI and the product is rapidly evolving to a full management platform.
In this session we will look at the new architecture and how to use it to your advantage. New dashboards and navigation are on the menu, as are smart alerts: we will spend a lot of time going over this new concept in vROps. And the icing on the cake is some API interaction, even from your iPad !
Expect some slides, a lot of talk and a lot of demo !
If you have not registered yet, you should really hurry to the VMUG website. There will be some rock stars presenting such as Joe Baguley, our EMEA CTO, and Scott Lowe, who came over especially from the NSBU Office of the CTO.
Monitor any OpenStack Icehouse implementation with vR Ops
The management packs keep coming after the announcement of vR Ops 6 last week. The latest one today is very interesting, since it allows you to monitor any OpenStack Icehouse implementation. Including the beta of our own VIO. (note this beta is now closed).
vRealize Operations Management Pack for OpenStack 1.0 is now GA and live on VMware Solution Exchange.
What’s new?
This management pack is the most advanced management pack to date and truly unique in its capabilities. It provides the most comprehensive set of operations management capabilities for OpenStack available today. Including the ability to manage OpenStack Cloud controllers, performance and capacity of OpenStack infrastructure, and advanced tenant focused troubleshooting.
The management pack can tie together data from several sources including vSphere, NSX, Hyperic, and Log Insight. Providing correlation across these data sources and launching in context to the relevant details for a given object. The management pack also works across any OpenStack icehouse distribution, including the current beta of the VMware Integrated OpenStack product. It is available for any vRealize Operations Advanced edition customer.
Download from VMware Solution Exchange: https://solutionexchange.vmware.com/store/products/management-pack-for-openstack-1-0
New management pack for NSX in vR Ops 6 !
Today we announced a new management pack for NSX-vSphere and NSX Multi-hypervisor. This is good stuff as we are now able to manage end to end and include networking data in vRealize Operations Manager. It is a free download, from the announcement:
The vR Ops Management Pack for NSX-vSphere 2.0 and vR Ops Management pack for NSX-MH 1.0 extends the operational management capabilities of vRealize Operations 6.0 into the areas of virtual and physical data center networking. It provides the following operations capabilities for virtual infrastructure administrators and network operations administrators, in highly virtualized network environments:
- Embedded dependency rules of both logical and physical networking relationships for problem alerting and root-cause problem solving. This includes detection and alerting of NSX configuration, connectivity, and health problems. All alerts are consolidated into a vRealize Operations Manager alert interface.
- Search and drill down functions for obtaining the operations health of deployed NSX objects.
- Extension of the core vRealize Operations Manager health and risk analytics engine for the inclusion of NSX object key performance and health indicators.
- Visibility of all NSX components including NSX manager, NSX controllers. Several different pre-defined vRealize Operations widgets are leveraged for representing NSX services.
Details of the release and the management pack can be downloaded from below links on VMware Solution Exchange:
vRealize Suite 6.0 refresh cloud operations details
Right on cue as promised we announced a lot of important new versions in the vRealize Suite for cloud operations. I will list here a reference to all documentation and download sites. cloud automation in a separate update.
In this post:
- vRealize Operations 6.0
vRealize Operations Manager 6.0. This is the big one we were all waiting for !
What’s New:
- New resilient architecture
- Unified user interface
- Smart Alerts
- Enhanced reporting
- Flexible capacity models
- Custom policies
- Unified storage visibility
Download Landing Page.
Documentation Landing Page.
Release Notes.
What’s new?
Hyperic 5.8.4 is a maintenance release with major and minor bug fixes.
In addition to general issue fixing, the following changes have been made in vCenter Hyperic 5.8.4.
- Non-English languages are supported for Windows operating systems.
- JRE version 7u71 is supported.
- Several updates have been made to some of the plug-ins
Download Landing Page.
Documentation Landing Page.
Release Notes.
We are pleased to announce the General Availability of vRealize Configuration Manager (VCM) 5.7.3, a key part of the VMware vRealize Operations Management Suite that automates configuration management across virtual, physical and cloud environments.
Organizations can use VCM to continuously audit the configurations of VMware infrastructure (including VMware ESX®, ESXi™, vCenter, vCloud® Director™ and vCloud® Networking and Security) as well as Windows, Linux and UNIX operating systems. Configuration compliance can be maintained against internal standards, security best practices, vendor hardening guidelines, and even regulatory mandates.
This release delivers critical enhancements requested by our customers, field and PSO teams to improve vSphere support, speed time to value, and extend capabilities for OS configuration management.
Highlights of this release include:
- Updated Platform Support for the VCM Collector
- Installation of the Collector and SQL Server components on Windows Server 2012 and 2012R2 is now supported
- Existing installations of VCM can be upgraded or migrated to Windows Server 2012 or 2012R2 as part of the installation process for 5.7.3
- Added Support for New Versions of Client Platforms
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7
- CentOS 7
- Oracle Enterprise Linux 7
- vSphere 6 Ready
- VCM 5.7.3 will support vSphere 6 upon its release
- Support for older versions of vSphere is unchanged in VCM 5.7.3 (vSphere 4.0U1 and later)
Product Information and download pages.
Docs landing page.
Release notes.
Installation guide.
VMware vRealize Log Insight 2.5.0 is now GA and live on www.vmware.com.
What’s new?
This release introduces several new features in all areas of the product. Some key innovations and enhancements are:
- Event Trends Analyser
- Role-Based Access Control
- Integration with vRealize Operations Manager 6.0
- Log Insight Forwarder
- Integrated Load Balancer
- Built-In Content Packs
- Internationalisation
- New vRealize Log Insight Linux Agent
- Contextual Log Browsing for Events
- Several Usability, Performance and Security Improvements
Download Landing Page.
Documentation Landing Page.
Release Notes.
new product names matrix
You may have noticed that since VMworld we use some new product names for our management products. Since I have renamed the tags on my blog here accordingly, I wanted to give you a little table of transition here. What’s in a name you might say, well actually quite a lot since we rationalised things and put some more logic in. Things I explain in my presentations is that the new vRealize Operations has no obligatory link to VMware vCenter anymore, so it would be silly to still call it vCenter Operations Manager…
| old name | new name on premise | new name SaaS version |
| vCloud Hybrid Service | vCloud Air | |
| vCenter Operations Manager (vC Ops) | vRealize Operations (vR Ops) | vRealize Air Operations |
| vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) | vRealize Automation (vR A) | vRealize Air Automation |
| ITBM | vRealize Business |
Please also note that our public cloud service changed names to vCloud Air. And … you see of course that we have SaaS versions in the pipeline. These will live in vCloud Air but can also be used to manage your private cloud. A first tool not in the table is in beta, namely vCloud Air Compliance, a tool to perform the compliance part of vCenter Configuration Manager without local installation !
There is also a vRealize suite which contains Operations, Automation and Business. The difference with vCloud Suite is that vRealize is positioned for hybrid environments with multiple hypervisors and external cloud services. It is licensed per OSI (operating system instance). More info here.
New winter school sessions @ VMware BeLux
In January the VMware BeLux SE team organizes again free technical enablement sessions in Zaventem and Luxemburg, see details below. I will deliver the cloud operations and cloud automation day with Stef Verbist and the Openstack, containers,… afternoon with Filip Verloy.
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Agenda – overview:
Don’t miss this opportunity and register for these sessions. |
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