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!