Let’s talk about vRealize Operations.
This post (part 1) covers deploying VMware Vrealize Operations but we will also focus on the added value and basic functionality of this amazing product.
vRealize Operations assists you in monitoring and optimizing the performance of your environment. But vRealize also enables you to troubleshoot issues occurring in you environment and allow you to monitoring capacity and cots of your environment and the cost of your environment. So that you can proactively plan, in advance to have the capacity that you need!
vRealize Operations comes in 2 flavors, one for in your private data center and additionally there is a Cloud version (vRealize Operation CLOUD). The cool aspect of the Cloud version is you don’t have to install them, you simply have to subscribe to them!
Key features of vRealize Operations are:
- Intelligens operations, with self-learning management.
- Policy-based automation
- Unified management
vRealize provides also Efficient Capacity & Cost management.
vRealize Architecture
vRealize consist of 2 nodes, the Primary and the Primary Replica. The Primary Node is the first node which is responsible for the management of the cluster. The HA functionality deploys a Primary Replica node. When the Primary node goes down, the Primary Replica will failover all the services.
You can enable HA for the vRealize cluster by converting a data node (promote) to a replica node. You need a minimum of two nodes to create a primary replica.
Data Node.
You can have one or more Data nodes. The Data node has a similar architecture to the primary and primary replica nodes. However the data node does not have a central vPostgres database and cannot acts as an NTP server. The Data Node exist to collect data.
Remote Collector Node Role.
A remote collector node is an extra cluster node that allows vRealize operations to gather more objects in its inventory monitoring. Remote collectors a typicaly deployed in remote locations (remote office/remote branch).
Remote collectors have the Admin UI, but they don’y have the Product Ui. They don’t do not process the data, just gather the data and ship the data to the cluster.
For adapter resilience and load balancing, you can create a collector group and simply add remote collector (nodes) to this group.
You can create a single node or multiple nodes cluster depending on the environment.
a vRealize Operations cluster uses Pivotal GemFire to connect nodes to a shared memory cluster and map the work across the nodes.
Continuous Availability
To provide continuous availability you can assign Fault Domains to a data node. For this feature you also have to deploy a witness node.
Deploying vRealize Operation Nodes
You can deploy vRealize Operations as a VMware virtual appliance. Before you install this solution you should size your environment. The following parameters help you determine the best design:
Number of object to monitor
- Enable HA
- Enable CA
- Collection data from remote locations
- types of nodes
Sizing you cluster based on CPU and Memory.
When you create nodes, follow the sizing guidelines. Resource sizing must be identical across all the nodes in the cluster.
And last but not least, Integrated Configuration and Compliance (scanning and remediation)
vRealize Operation Cluster.
To deploy your vRealize Operations cluster you start by deploying the primary node. Once the node has been deploy you have Run initial setup, you can optional add additional nodes.
- Express installation
- New installation
- Expanding an Existing Installation
vRealize Operatins components!
The Quick Start page is the default landing page. Let’s hit the Operations Overview page.
There are several useful widgets available, These Widgets provide a lot of information on a graphical way.
The Quick Start page:
- You can use Optimizing Performance to ensure the continuous performance optimization of workloads.
- You can use Optimizing Capacity to assess the current state pf capacity in you data centers.
- You can use Troubleshoot to asses the current alerts in the system and troubleshoot any problems.
- You can use Manage Configuration to configure objects effectively.
- You can use Extend Monitoring to configure objects effectively
See the video below, how to Right Size some workload.
Automation Central
vRealize Operations admins can create jobs to automate optimization actions such as reclaim or rightsize VM’s in a specific time window, just like in the demo above!
In this example old snapshots will be automatically removed.
The administration page manage and maintain the vRealize Operations Instance. Administrator perform any non-cluster configuration from this page.
So far this post (part 1) in the next post I will cover additional functionality like Policies, Custom Dashboard(s), User Access Control and how to Extending and Managing a vRealize Operation Deployment.
So stay tuned!
End of this post.
Disclaimer: This blog is based on my personal title and assumptions. No rights can be derived from this blog.