vbulosity

VMware just released a new update to its popular cloud operations management and monitoring suite.  vRealize Operations Manager 6.2 is the newest release of the VMware's integrated vRealize Operations Suite in the SDDC family. Updates address all major features of the product including installation, configuration, licensing, alerting, dashboards, reports, policies as well as introducing some new enhancements.

As mentioned in my Datastore Oversubscription Dashboard post, here is the VM Storage Consumption Dashboard. It appears very similar to the oversubscription one but it looks at storage use from another perspective. Mainly, it shows who/which VMs are the biggest consumers of storage resources. In addition, we can also see how much of the allocated storage space the VMs are actually utilizing, and if the Guest OS partitions are filling up, provided that VMware Tools are installed and running. Besides the visuals, we have some overall environment storage utilization stats, followed by cluster and VM.

A lot of my clients want to deploy vROps with High Availability (HA) option enabled. When I hear this, I simply ask them to name at least one business requirement that dictates the use of HA for vROps in their environment. The answer I typically get is something like this: "because we want HA" with some undertones of: how dare you ask, you should know we're a very important company! Well, working as a vROps consultant over the last year, I realized that there are a lot of misconceptions about the vROps HA feature. In this post, I would like to clarify some things about vROps HA and hopefully empower you to make the right decision when designing your vSphere monitoring solution.

There has been a lot of hype surrounding the new scale-out vROps architecture, which enables you to easily add more nodes to vROps analytics cluster as needed. However, is scale-out always the right choice? Sometimes, a scale-up option may be better suited depending on what shortfall you are trying to address. In this post, we will go through some common scenarios that will help you make the right decision for your environment and hopefully make this process more of a science than an art.

A customer recently challenged me to create a Datastore dashboard showing how oversubscribed their thin provisioned vSphere Datastores are. This was a twist on my VM Storage Consumption dashboard that I have been doing for a while and will post next time. The goal of this new dashboard is to visualize the Datastore subscription rate of the thin provisioned Datastores in the virtual environment. In addition, it can show impacted virtual machines as well as some additional storage-related key performance indicators.