Evaluation Guide

vSphere with Operations

Management 6 - vRealize

Operations Manager

Evaluation Guide

V M W A R E T E C H N I C A L M A R K E T I N G 2 0 1 5

Table of Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

.................................................................................................. 2

EVALUATION INSTALLATION AND SETUP

..................................................... 3

Installing the OVA ...................................................................................................................... 3

Express Installation and Initial Configuration Wizard ..................................................................... 9

Setting up vSphere Hardening Compliance .......................................................................... 22

EVALUATION PHASES

.................................................................................... 25

PHASE 1: DAY 1

– 15 TO 20 MINUTES AFTER INSTALL

.............................. 26

Finding and Fixing Misconfigurations ................................................................................... 26

Ensuring VMware Hardening Compliance ............................................................................ 29

Resolving Resource Contention ............................................................................................ 34

Resolving Virtual Environment Faults ................................................................................... 37

PHASE 2: 15 DAYS AFTER INSTALL

.............................................................. 39

Resolving Storage Latency ..................................................................................................... 39

Resolving Problems Based on Learned Behaviors ............................................................. 40

PHASE 3: 1 MONTH AFTER INSTALL

............................................................. 42

Understanding and Analyzing Capacity and Risk ................................................................ 42

Improving Utilization and Optimizing Resources ................................................................. 52

Capacity Forecasting ............................................................................................................... 59

APPENDIX

......................................................................................................... 62

Navigating the UI Efficiently ................................................................................................... 62

Working with Views and Reports ........................................................................................... 66

How to Work with Alerts .......................................................................................................... 68

Introduction

Introduction

This document outlines the process to evaluate VMware vRealize Operations™ Manager 6

Standard Edition. This edition is a main component of the VMware vSphere® with Operations

Management™ (VSOM) offering. This document will help you from product installation and configuration and through all of the evaluation steps.

The evaluation includes four easy-to-follow sections:



Installation and Setup



Phase 1: Day 1, 15 to 20 minutes after install



Phase 2: 15 days after install



Phase 3: 1 month after install

For more details and information, please use the following references:



The Appendix of this document contains sections that will help you during the evaluation.



YouTube vSOM Playlist – Contains videos that will help you better understand vRealize

Operations Manager

 vRealize Operations Manager Product page

 vRealize Operations Manager Getting Started page

V M W A R E T E C H N I C A L M A R K E T I N G 2 0 1 5 | P A G E 2

VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.com

Copyright © 2014 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at http://www.vmware.com/go/patents. VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions.

Evaluation Installation and Setup

Evaluation Installation and Setup

Installing the OVA

Follow standard deployment methods for an OVF/OVA in the vSphere client of your choice. For specifics on deploying the vRealize Operations Manager, follow the steps below and reference the following video:



VMware vRealize Operations - Deploy vRealize Operations Manager

Browse to the vRealize Operations Manager Appliance OVA .


Copyright © 2014 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws.

VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at http://www.vmware.com/go/patents. VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions.

V M W A R E T E C H N I C A L M A R K E T I N G 2 0 1 5 | P G 3

Select Accept extra configuration options.


Choose Accept on the Accept EULAs page.





Give the vRealize Operations VM a name and target folder.


Pick a configuration size , most likely small for an evaluation. For more information on sizing please see the associated KB article: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2093783.





Choose the target compute for the VM.


Choose target storage for the VM.





Choose the target network for VM.


Configure the appropriate network setting for the VM. ( Note: Setting up a DNS FQDN entry for the vRealize Operations virtual machine prior to the installation is highly recommended.)





Confirm the installation settings .


Wait for the VM to deploy and start.

Once vRealize Operations Manager VM is running, you can point a browser at the IP address, or FQDN and move onto the Express Installation and Initial Configuration section of this document.






Express Installation and Initial Configuration Wizard

( Note: These steps assume the vRealize OVF has already been deployed and configured, and the VM has been started.)

To run the Express Installation and Configuration process, follow the steps below and reference the following video:



VMware vRealize Operations - Express Install and Getting Started

T o start the Express Installation process, point your browser at the VM’s IP address.

For an ev aluation, it’s recommended you choose the Express Installation .






Click Next .




V M W A R E T E C H N I C A L M A R K E T I N G 2 0 1 5 | P G 1 0

Set the Administrator (admin) password .

Click Next .


Click Finish .





Wait for vRealize Operations Manager to deploy the node.







Once vRealize Operations Manager starts, you should be redirected to the login screen. If not, reenter the IP or FQDN of the new vRealize Operations Manager install.

You will now be directed to the Product UI.

Log in with the user ID admin and the password you set during install to complete the final setup steps.

Click New Environment .

Click Next .





Click Accept on the EULA page.

Click Next .






Select Product Evaluation (no key required) .

Click Next .






Click Finish .







This completes vRealize Operations Manager deployment, however we have a few more steps to complete before we begin collecting data.

For vRealize Operations Manager to collect data from vSphere, you must configure it to communicate with vCenter Server(s). For this step, you will need the FQDN or IP of all the vCenter Servers to be used for the evaluation.

Since this is a new installation, you’ll automatically start at the Administration  Solutions screen . From there, you’ll be guided to configure a new VMware vSphere Adapter Instance.

Click Configure .






We will need to create both a vCenter Adapter instance and a vCenter Python Actions Adapter instance, for each vCenter Server needed for the evaluation. The process is exactly the same for each adapter.

( Note: While naming the Python Adapter, use a slightly different name for the same vCenter

Server. This will help minimize confusion later. For example, building a set of adapters for a vCenter Server with FQDN mgmtvcw, you might call the vCenter Adapter “mgmt-vcw” and the

Python Adapter “mgmt-vcw-python”.)



Display Name: o Simply meta data but must be unique



Description: o Description of the adapter instance

 vCenter Server: o FQDN or IP of the vCenter you wish to connect to



Credential: o If none exists, click the green +to create a new set of credentials to use.








Manage Credential o Credential Name

 Used in drop down for previous screen, can be used by multiple adapter instances o User Name

 User who has, at minimum, read access to all objects needed to be monitored in vSphere o Password



Test Connection: o Click this button to test the new connection



Advanced Setting o Collector

 Leave as default for the evaluation o Auto discovery

 Set to true o Process Change Events

 Set to true o Registration User

 Admin user who has rights to make changes in vCenter o Registration Password

 Password for admin user






Repeat process for each vCenter required for evaluation by clicking the green +.

Before proceeding, test all connections and click Save Settings .






Click Next to advance to the Policy Wizard.

The answers to this wizard define the initial default policy for vRealize Operations Manager. The default policy defines how vRealize Operations Manager will handle calculations for the data it ingests.

Use the settings below for your evaluation. These best-practice settings, based on customer feedback, match the most common use cases in an evaluation. In practice, you may need to change these defaults to match the environment needs when you go live with the software, but those are easy to change at that time.






Setting up vSphere Hardening Compliance

In order to leverage the vSphere Compliance features and functionality, turn on the alerts associated with these issues in the default policy created during installation. These alerts are turned off by default because they can generate a lot of alerts tha t you will typically only want enabled in production. However, because this is an evaluation, turn them on for all host and VM objects.

Use the Administration Quick link and choose Policies . Click the Policy Library tab , select the Default Policy and click the pencil icon to edit the policy.

Quick Link






Go to the 5 th step in the workspace “Override Alert/Symptom Definitions”. In order to get the most space for the next step, click Collapse in the top right corner.

Type “Hardening” in the search box and hit return to filter results for the two vSphere hardening alerts (shown below).






Change the state of these two alerts to Local Active (the green checkbox and NOT the red circle).

Hit Save on the workspace to save the settings to this policy.

Compliance alerts and findings will be available within 5 to 10 minutes after making this change.





Evaluation Phases

Evaluation Phases

The purpose of this Evaluation Guide is to outline how to quickly and concisely express the value of vRealize Operations Manager 6 in a customer environment. It is broken into 3 main phases:

Phase 1: Day 1, 15 to 20 minutes after install – Run these evaluation steps approximately 20 minutes after the installation has been completed.

Phase 2: 1 Week after install – Run these evaluation steps 1 week after the installation has been completed.

Phase 3: 1 Month after install – Run these evaluation steps 1 month after the installation has been completed.

Each phase has different use case scenarios that vRealize Operations Manager can be used to help you in managing your environment.





Phase 1: Day 1 – 15 to 20 minutes after install

Phase 1: Day 1 – 15 to 20 minutes after install

Finding and Fixing Misconfigurations

TITLE: Cluster - Verify Cluster is Configured to Handle an HA Event

WHERE TO GO: View  Cluster Configuration Summary

SIGNIFICANCE: In a production cluster, one where specific VMs must recover from a host failure, or some other HA event, it is very important that the cluster is properly configured. For instance, Admission Control must be turned on. vRealize Operations Manager has an out-of-thebox view to quickly verify that if cluster HA is turned on, so too is Admission Control. Again, this is important because if HA is on, but Admission Control is not, the cluster may not respond to an HA event as expected.



Verify that HA, DRS, Admission Control are configured across all clusters and across all vCenters.



Look for clusters in your enterprise that have HA enabled, but have Admission Control turned off or other misconfigurations related to HA.

VMware Documentation: vSphere Admission Control: http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-55/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-

55-availability-guide.pdf

(Page 29)

DRS Performance Best Practices: http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/drs_performance_best_practices_wp.pdf

Storage DRS: http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vmw-vsphr-5-1-stor-drs-uslet-101-web.pdf






TITLE: Host - Verify Required Services are Enabled/Disabled

WHERE TO GO: View  Host Important Services Summary

SIGNIFICANCE: Accurate time is extremely important. Many customers make use of the

NTP configuration in ESXi to keep virtual machines timed in sync. However, even in a relatively small environment, virtual machine timing can be a challenge to monitor. We can easily use the out-of-the-box view in vRealize Operations Manager to quickly show how NTP is configured across all clusters.

It is also common for users to turn on SSH on the host(s) to do some form of maintenance, and then forget to turn it off. Security best practice is to leave SSH disabled.



Confirm that NTP is running on all hosts



Confirm SSH is not enabled as per best practices






TITLE: Verify VMware Tools Status

WHERE TO GO: View  VMware Tools Status Summary

SIGNIFICANCE: VMware Tools is ubiquitous across VMs in vSphere clusters. As environments grow, it can be a challenge to keep track of the status (running, version, support) of VMware tools on each VM. With the out of the box view from vRealize Operations Manager, we can quickly show this information and more.



Confirm VMware Tools status o VM Running o VM Tools Version

 “Guest Tools Supported” – Installed, Running, but not Current

 “Guest Tools Not Installed”

 “Guest Tools Current” o VM Tools Running

Check version of VMware Tools: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&exter nalId=1003947

Versions of VMware Tools: https://packages.vmware.com/tools/versions

Matrix of VMware Tools Version Responses: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&exter nalId=2011350






Ensuring VMware Hardening Compliance

TITLE: Compliance Alerts

WHERE TO GO: Recommendations Dashboard and Compliance Analysis Badge

For more details on this topic please view the following videos:

 vSphere Hardening – VMware vRealize Operations 6



Analysis Badges - Compliance Badge - VMware vRealize Operations 6

SIGNIFICANCE: vRealize Operations Manager provides out-of-the-box compliance checks and alerts against vSphere hardening guidelines. Compliance violations are important to understand when managing your virtual environment, especially when taking configuration changes into consideration in the context of performance impact. vRealize Operations treats compliance

violations as just another type of alert so you can use the How to Work with Alerts appendix

section of this document to understand the simple flow of working with a compliance violation.

However, compliance violations are also critically important, so a separate Analysis Badge is also available for reviewing these violations (as shown below). Compliance alerts in vRealize

Operations Manager can appear on the host or virtual machine objects and come in two forms:



Virtual machine is violating vSphere hardening guidelines



ESXi host is violating vSphere hardening guidelines






In most environments, the majority of the hosts and virtual machines will have some sort of compliance violation. The easiest way to find these is to look at the Recommendations

Dashboard under the Risk column heading.






Clicking on the alert or View Details link will take you to the alert summary page. Here you will get a listing of all of the violations listed as symptoms to the alert. You will also see when the violation was discovered. It’s important to note these will likely all have the same date/time at this point since this is the first collection cycle for compliance. Any changes that affect compliance going forward will have the date/time of the change itself.






As noted above, compliance violations can also be found on the Compliance Analysis page. The easiest way to get to this page is to click the Environment Quick Link , select vSphere Hosts and Clusters , and expand to any host. Then click the Analysis tab and select the Compliance tab . This will bring up any compliance violations for this host object (e.g., 10 of 18 rules have been violated). If you click the ESXi hardening standard , it will expand to show you all of the violations (these will match those shown as symptoms to the alert as shown above). You can also use the Related Objects tree (below the Host Violated Rules section) to quickly identify peers and child objects with compliance violations (not shown).






Resolving Storage Latency Due to Snapshots

TITLE: Snapshot Effects on Datastore Latency

WHERE TO GO: Recommendations Dashboard- Health Panel or Alerts page

SIGNIFICANCE: Disk is widely considered the slowest resource in the environment; a slow datastore can have a huge impact on the performance of a vSphere workload. Often times, snapshots, large or complex (meaning a large hierarchy) are the culprits. vRealize Operations

Manager can quickly correlate and expose instances of high latency bound with snapshots.

Use the How to Work with Alerts appendix section of this document to understand the simple flow

of working with an alert in vRealize Operations. Here is an example alert that best illustrates vRealize Operat ions’ ability to find and resolve storage latency issues:



Virtual machine has disk I/O latency problem caused by snapshots - Finds VMs with high CPU I/O wait times where snapshots are the likely culprit






Resolving Resource Contention

TITLE: CPU Contention Alerts

WHERE TO GO: Recommendations Dashboard – Health Panel or Alerts page

SIGNIFICANCE: Multi-vCPU with multi-core sockets have created huge opportunity for VI admins, but also increased complexity. A multi vCPU workload now has to be scheduled with the host’s available cores along with all the other demands for CPU time. As we build more multivCPU workloads, and move towards higher consolidation ratios, this complexity grows. vRealize

Operations Manager has out-of-the-box alerting to help VI admins get ahead of any challenges related to CPU contention in the vSphere environment.

Use the How to Work with Alerts appendix section of this document to understand the simple flow

of working with an alert . Here are some example alerts that best illustrate vRealize Operations’ ability to find and resolve CPU contention issues:



Virtual machine has CPU contention caused by swap wait – Finds VMs with high

CPU swap wait times



Virtual machine has CPU contention caused by IO wait – Finds VMs with high

CPU I/O wait times



Virtual machine has CPU contention caused by co-stop – Finds VMs with high

CPU co-stop where a vCPU can be removed to resolve the issue



Virtual machine is demanding more CPU than the configured lim it – Finds VMs where the CPU demand is above the configured limit



Host has CPU contention caused by [less/more] than half of the virtual machines – Finds Hosts with CPU contention where a certain percentage of the

VMs also have very high CPU demand



Host has CPU contention due to overpopulation of virtual machines - Finds

Hosts with CPU contention where no VMs have very high CPU demand (i.e., no single VM is offending)



Cluster has CPU contention caused by [less/more] than half of the virtual machines – Finds clusters with CPU contention where a certain percentage of the

VMs also have very high CPU demand



Cluster has CPU contention due to overpopulation of virtual machines - Finds clusters with CPU contention where no VMs have very high CPU demand (i.e., no single VM is offending)






TITLE: CPU Contention Dashboard

WHERE TO GO: Dashboard  vSphere Dashboard  vSphere VMs CPU

SIGNIFICANCE: CPU and memory contention can cause serious issues in a cluster. vRealize

Operations Manager can show very quickly if there is contention in the vSphere environment, which VMs are the cause, and exactly which hosts are being affected.

This dashboard is made up of 4 heatmap widgets and 2 Top -N widgets. Each heatmap is configured to use CPU Demand % as size, then colored by contention, IO wait, Swap wait, and Ready, and finally grouped by each cluster. This dashboard, at a glance, is good for identifying virtual machines with large amounts of demand and contention. It also categorizes the type of contention like Ready, IO wait, and Swap wait. With this level of graphic mapping, a VI admin can quickly see if there are individual VMs with a specific contention issue, or if there is a more wide-scale issue across the environment.






TITLE: Memory Contention Alerts


SIGNIFICANCE:

Use the How to Work with Alerts appendix section of this document to

understand the simple flow of working with an alert. Here are some example alerts that best illustrate vRealize Operations ability to find and resolve memory contention issues:



Virtual machine has memory contention due to swap wait and high disk read latency – Finds VMs with high memory swap wait times



Virtual machine has memory contention due to memory compression, ballooning or swapping – This is usually due to overpopulation of VMs on the host.



Virtual machine has chronic high memory workload leading to memory stress – VM is experiencing memory stress due to insufficient memory resources



Virtual machine is swapping memory due to Limit – VM is swapping memory due to limit set on the memory consumption. This is adversely affecting the performance of the

VM.



Host has memory contention caused by less than half of the virtual machines –

Finds hosts with memory contention where a certain percentage of the VMs also have very high memory demand



Cluster has memory contention due to overpopulation of virtual machines – The cluster has memory contention due to overpopulation of VMs. There is a small (or large) number of VMs, overloading the cluster.



Cluster has many virtual machines that have memory contention due to memory compression, ballooning or swapping - Cluster has more than 5% of VMs that have memory compression, ballooning or swapping, indicating memory contention.






Resolving Virtual Environment Faults

TITLE: Faults Alerts in the Virtual Environment

WHERE TO GO: Recommendations Dashboard – Health Panel and Fault Analysis Badge




Analysis Badges – Fault Badge – VMware vRealize Operations 6

SIGNIFICANCE: Faults are warning events created by vRealize Operations Manager or collected from other sources (e.g., vCenter). These warning events are important to understand when managing your virtual environment. vRealize Operations Manager treats faults as just another

type of alert, so you can use the How to Work with Alerts appendix section of this document to

understand the simple flow of working with a fault. However, because faults are also critically important, a separate analysis badge is also available for reviewing faults (as shown below).

Faults in vRealize Operations Manager can appear on the vCenter, cluster, host, or datastore objects and can include (but are not limited to):



Hardware Sensor Health



Fan Sensor Health



Memory Sensor Health



Host Redundancy Lost



Host Connectivity Lost



HA Failover Resources Insufficient

 vCenter Server Health Change



Guest File System Out of Space

As noted above, faults can also be found on the Fault Analysis page. The easiest way to locate faults without using the Recommendation Dashboard is to go to Environment Quick Link , go to

Hosts and Clusters and select the vSphere World object. Then click the Environment tab and select Faults . This will show you any object with a fault (non-green).






From here, you can simply double click the object to make it the focus of the UI, then choose

Analysis and select the Fault Badge tab . Here is the second place (the first being the alert generated from the fault) where you can see the details of the fault(s) on an object.





Phase 2: 15 Days after install

Phase 2: 15 Days after install

Resolving Storage Latency

TITLE: IO Latency Alerts


SIGNIFICANCE:

Use the How to Work with Alerts appendix section of this document to

understand the simple flow of working with an alert in vRealize Operations. Here are some exam ple alerts that best illustrate vRealize Operations’ ability to find and resolve storage latency issues:



Virtual machine has disk I/O write latency problem – Finds VMs with abnormally high write latency



Virtual machine has disk I/O read latency problem – Finds VMs with abnormally high read latency






Resolving Problems Based on Learned Behaviors

TITLE: Abnormality Based Alerts

WHERE TO GO: Recommendations Dashboard - Health Panel or Alerts page




Analysis Badges - Anomalies Badge - VMware vRealize Operations 6

SIGNIFICANCE: vRealize Operations Manager is unique in its ability to understand the

“normal state” in a customer’s IT infrastructure. The ability to understand when an object

(VM, ESX Host, Datastore, etc.) is acting normally is crucial information in today’s software defined datacenter (SDDC).

For each monitored object, vRealize Operations Manager collects metrics and determines the normal threshold band (a.k.a. Dynamic Threshold or DT) for each and every metric collected.

Think of it as the normal high and low range for any given metric for each hour of the day, day of the week, and week of the year, etc. These DTs are then used to determine what should be considered “normal” at any given time of the day. If a metric is found to be outside its DT, it is considered abnormal and flagged as an abnormality. We can then use these abnormalities to help drive much smarter alerting and to remove the dependency on hard thresholds that often leads to invalid results or false positives.

The fact that the CPU demand on a VM runs hot each day from 8:00 a.m. to 8:15 a.m. as people log in during the mornings is not very interesting, and you probably don’t want a hard thresholdbased alert letting you know each and every work day that it’s occurring. With Dynamic

Thresholds, this would not happen, as this would be considered expected behavior.

Conversely, it would be great to know when the CPU demand is high and it is not normally running high at this time of the day. That is an alert that you do want to be aware of as you can be sure the phone will be ringing soon with a user complaining.

Use the How to Work with Alerts appendix section of this document to understand the simple

flow of working with an alert. Here are some example alerts that best illustrate vRealize

Operations’ ability to find and resolve abnormality issues:



Datastore is consuming disk space in a rapid and unexpected manner – The datastore is losing usable disk space at an abnormally alarming rate.



Datastore has unexpected high Disk IO workload – The datastore is experiencing abnormally high read/write activity.



Virtual machine has unexpected high disk I/O workload – The VM is experiencing abnormally high read/write activity.



Virtual machine has unexpected high memory workload – The VM is experiencing abnormally high memory usage.



Virtual machine has unexpected high CPU workload – The VM is experiencing abnormally high CPU usage.








Cluster has unexpected high memory workload and contention – The cluster is experiencing abnormally high memory usage.



Cluster has unexpected high CPU workload – The cluster is experiencing abnormally high CPU usage.





Phase 3: 1 Month after install

Phase 3: 1 Month after install

Understanding and Analyzing Capacity and Risk

vRealize Operations Manager helps you apply demand and allocation capacity planning principles while managing the capacity of your virtual and cloud environments across any object type.

A virtual machine’s allocation is the total amount of a resource you configure to the VM. Demand is the amount of those resources the VM is presently asking for. Usage is the amount of that resource the VM currently receives. vRealize Operations Manager can track capacity of your environment and workloads using two capacity models: Allocation and Demand. It is critical for IT organizations to have clarity and visibility into how their capacity resources are being utilized and consumed.




Concepts: Capacity Planning Basics - VMware vRealize Operations 6



Concepts: Capacity Planning Terms - VMware vRealize Operations 6



Capacity Optimization and Scenario Modeling - VMware vRealize Operations 6



Analysis Badges - Capacity Remaining Badge - VMware vRealize Operations 6



Analysis Badges - Time Remaining Badge - VMware vRealize Operations 6

TITLE: What’s my current capacity?

WHERE TO GO: Capacity Remaining Badge - Leverage the Analysis badge page and go to the Capacity Remaining sub tab . Start at the vSphere World Object , then go to the vCenter

Object , and then a Cluster Compute Resource object . This will help show the Capacity

Remaining data from multiple perspectives (world, VC(s), cluster(s)). You can even drill down deeper, but understanding capacity at the virtual capacity provider’s level can be very powerful.

SIGNIFICANCE: Understanding current capacity levels, remaining capacity, when you will run out of capacity, and how many more resources you can support are all vital statistics of which you should be aware. vRealize Operations Manager surfaces all of this information, and much more, to help you better prepare for shortfalls, and to allow you to balance workloads and budget for future growth.

The vSphere World level, gives a quick snapshot of the capacity remaining. At this level, the system displays a Capacity Remaining score and the capacity trend over the last 6 weeks. Based on this information, there is a high level of capacity remaining at the vSphere World level.






The current Capacity Remaining Breakdown frame gives a quick snapshot of the objects within the environment and the associated capacity severities. You definitely want to be concerned with those that are at an Immediate or Critical Severity level. Further below, the objects are listed by severity level, and you can quickly see those that are critical for capacity remaining.






Next, look at this from the Cluster Compute Resource perspective.

The capacity remaining score in our example is zero and red in color. This indicates that we are out of capacity for some resource categories listed on the screen. The capacity remaining trend on the right shows that this capacity shortfall has been ongoing for some time.

The capacity remaining breakdown view, shows all the usable capacity has been consumed

(100% of usable capacity). Note the different virtual machine size profiles including:



Large profile is equal to the size of the largest VM within the selected objects hierarchy.



Small profile is equal to the size of the smallest VM within the selected objects hierarchy.



Medium profile is the median size.

 Average profile is the average size of all powered on VM’s.

In this specific cluster, there is no room for additional virtual machines. Looking deeper, we can see that we are over-subscribed on both Demand (112%) and Allocation (111%) for CPU (and memory off screen).






Below is one of the associated Alerts and Recommendation for the cluster object.






TITLE: What are my growth trends, and infrastructure burn rates?

WHERE TO GO: Views – Trend Views - There are many trend views at different levels of the vSphere hierarchy. Filter on the word “trend”.

SIGNIFICANCE: There are trending views that focus on Host and VM growth, and there are other trending views that focus on resource category trends, like CPU, Memory, Disk IO, Network IO,

IOPS, and Latency, etc. These provide views into the current resource values as well as the projected trends. Different trend views will be available depending on the object you have selected on the left. Focus on the views at the cluster, host, and VM level.

The image below shows the Clusters CPU Demand Forecast Trend. According to this information, CPU Demand dips over the last 10 days have resulted in a downwards forecast trend. If CPU demand patterns suddenly started to change, then this forecast trend would also change.






The image below gives a quick birds-eye view of all the badge scores and shows how the badge scores have been trending relative to each other.

There are many other views that can be leveraged. Please take the time to look through these and present the views that show compelling data to the client.






TITLE: Are there any capacity Risks?

WHERE TO GO: Recommendations Dashboard – Risk Panel, Alerts page and Numerous

Dashboards

To show capacity risk, start at the Recommendations Dashboard. There are many potentials places you will want to look at. The Recommendations Dashboard is the best place to start as it bubbles up important risk information in the form of alerts.

SIGNIFICANCE: Capacity risk indicators help you identify capacity shortfalls, which could be related to high resource demand and are otherwise not easy to identify.

Starting at the Recommendations Dashboard, go to the Critical and Immediate Risk Alerts and drill into their details. These details will point out any areas of capacity challenges that could be a result of capacity resources shortfalls. In the image below, notice the chronic high CPU and memory workloads. This chronic high workload is resulting in stress, and prolonged periods of stress often indicate capacity risk and shortfall.






Here is a sample list of risk alerts to look for in the risk column:



Datastore is running out of disk space



Virtual machine has CPU contention caused by co-stop



Virtual machine has chronic high CPU workload leading to CPU stress



Virtual machine is demanding more CPU than the configured limit



Virtual machine has chronic high memory workload leading to memory stress



Virtual machine is projected to run out of disk space

Next, open the vSphere Dashboards  vSphere Capacity Risk dashboard. This dashboard provides a bird’s-eye view of the virtual machines that are at most risk for stress and time remaining. It also provides visibility into those VMs that are underutilized and oversized, highlighting areas of better optimization potential. The heatmaps at the bottom of the dashboard help visualize this data with a slightly different perspective.






Many organizations like to look at resource consumption from the cluster perspective, so it’s important to examine the Cluster Capacity Risk Forecast . Select the vSphere World , or vCenter Server , or Virtual Data Center object on the left, and go to the Cluster Capacity

Risk Forecast view.

There are many views related to cluster compute object capacity, so please examine a few of them. The example below quickly shows the number of VMs running, how many hosts in each of those clusters as well as capacity remaining based for the next 30 days, 60 days, and 90 days.

There are a number of very powerful out-of-the-box views that help diagnose datastore capacity issues. The view below the Datastore Disk I/O Diagnose List shows all the datastores and many

I/O metrics that affect datastore performance and capacity.






Next, open the vSphere Dashboards  vSphere Datastores Dashboard. This dashboard gives a quick view of disk space and latency. The ranked list below the heatmaps shows the top datastores with the highest number of IOPs and average latency in the last 24 hours.






Improving Utilization and Optimizing Resources

TITLE: Reclaiming Waste

WHERE TO GO: Recommendations Page – Efficiency Panel, Reclaimable Capacity

Analysis Badge and numerous Capacity Reports










Analysis Badges - Reclaimable Capacity Badge - VMware vRealize Operations 6

SIGNIFICANCE: vRealize Operations Manager has unparalleled integration capabilities into your enterprise ecosystem. This integration brings out prescriptive, clear and concise insights into how your valuable resources are utilized. These insights very clearly show the path to optimizing your environment.

Here are a few of the top areas of concern.

Reclaimable Capacity – The Recommendations Dashboard is the place to start again. The

Efficiency Panel (far right) shows at-a-glance how the environment is using its available resources. Your policy setting are very important. Questions asked during initial configuration such as how you deploy your VMs (CPU/Memory/Storage overcommit) come into play on this panel. In the example, there is an idle VM alert that should be examined.






Here is a sample list of Efficiency alerts to look for in the Efficiency panel:



Virtual machine has large disk



Virtual machine is idle

Now look into the Reclaimable Capacity Badge by clicking on the Environment Quick Link , then vSphere Hosts and Clusters . Here, we can explore the vSphere Infrastructure and at each container object level. From the vSphere world all the way down to the individual VMs we can easily show how available resources are being used. This example shows a cluster with 23 vCPUs, 23.25GB of memory, and 53.32GB of disk which can be reclaimed. This is further broken out into Oversized, Idle, and Powered Off VMs.






By running the Idle, Oversized, and Powered Off VMs report for the same container objects we can drill into some of the details. From the same screen as above, click the Reports tab , search for VMs Report , highlight each report, and then click Run Template .

Here’s an example of a Powered Off VMs report.

Here’s an example of an Oversized VMs report.





Here’s an example of a Host Resizing report.


Here’s an example of an Idle VMs report.






TITLE: Density and Consolidation

WHERE TO GO: Density Analysis Badge, View  Underutilized Clusters and

Capacity Projects




Analysis Badges - Density Badge - VMware vRealize Operations 6

SIGNIFICANCE: vRealize Operations Manager can quickly show vSphere density levels and compare them to target ratios, as well as perform predictive analysis on current and future deployments. It learns capacity and demand trends. Based on all this trending and historical data, it determines the environment’s density levels and scores. In addition, it reports the average VMto-host ratio as well as the optimal ratio. Consider checking this on a cluster-by-cluster basis. vRealize Operations Manager analyzes similar data for CPU and memory demand. The chart below shows how to further optimize density levels for the VM-to-host ratio as well as CPU and memory. Memory is the least optimized of the three categories in this example, and therefore has the lowest density score —a percentage based on the deviation of the average value from the optimal value.






Next, use vRealize Operations Manager Projects to do predictive analysis on the vSphere environment such as, in this example, cluster consolidation. This project is built to help us determine if an existing cluster can support the migrations of all workloads from another cluster for cluster consolidation, maybe because of the need to decommission aging hardware or other relevant reasons. In this case, the project scenario below is adding capacity demand to the cluster (management cluster). Notice that, even with the added demand, this cluster still has lots of capacity remaining.






TITLE: Over Commitment of Resources

WHERE TO GO: Capacity Remaining Analysis Badge










Analysis Badges - Capacity Remaining Badge - VMware vRealize Operations 6

SIGNIFICANCE: The Capacity Remaining tab can quickly show the over- or under-commitment of existing cluster resources.

Here we can see vRealize Operations Manager clearly and concisely shows the capacity remaining (or not) in a cluster. It dynamically takes into consideration vSphere HA buffers, pulling this information directly from vCenter. There is also direct and easy access to other deterministic information like demand forecast trends.

The screen below shows the over-allocation of CPU and memory resources, highlighted in the red frames. This analysis shows that, based on our policy settings for resource over-commitment, we have already exceeded those values.






Capacity Forecasting

TITLE: Ensuring Future Capacity through Capacity Modeling

WHERE TO GO: Projects - Build an example Capacity Project (a.k.a. What if scenario)










Capacity Optimization and Scenario Modeling - VMware vRealize Operations 6



How to Work with Projects - VMware vRealize Operations 6

SIGNIFICANCE: Understanding if the vSphere environment is running out of resources and if resources like CPU or memory are over-allocated is important. If a known future project will consume a large amount of resources, you will need to be able to forecast where the resource consumption is currently trending as well as apply some “what if” scenarios to see what capacity needs to be added, if any, to support the new project.

In the example below, there are constrained resources due to over-allocation, and the visual clearly indicates that there are memory, CPU, and disk space constraints.






In this example we will create a capacity project for the production cluster and add a number of vSphere hosts in 3 phases:



Phase 1: Add one host



Phase 2: Add one host



Phase 3: Add 6 hosts

Configure all phases with different dates.



Notice how phase 1 reduces the capacity shortfall slightly, but we still have shortfall (red).



Notice how phase 2 removes the capacity shortfall (no red), but we don’t have much extra capacity to grow.



Notice how phase 3 adds a lot more capacity, gives growing room, and extends the trend line well into the future.






Next, we will add workload demand to the production cluster by adding 3 more VMs for the corporate web application. This demand will increase over-allocation values and, as a result, increase the capacity shortfall. (Note: The two projects built in these examples are projected individually on the production cluster, therefore one removes capacity shortfall with time, and the second introduces more capacity shortfall.)

It’s valuable to visualize the impact of combining both projects (combining project impact) to the production cluster. Taking this step helps verify that we have enough capacity moving forward, and we no longer have a short-term capacity shortfall. The red frame in the graph below illustrates that we have more long-term capacity even with the additional demand (corporate web application VMs).





Appendix

Appendix

Navigating the UI Efficiently

You can read about the new UI in the content below, or you can watch the following video:



Use the vRealize Operations Manager User Interface vRealize Operations Manager 6 has a navigation tree on the left side of the display. From this tree, you can access to any part of the solution, as well as any object that has metrics collected from an adapter instance. To get to the trunk of the navigation tree, click Environment .

From here you can navigate to any custom group, application or any objects collected by an adapter instance or management pack.





Appendix

To view all vSphere vCenter servers, virtual datacenters, clusters, VM, and resource pool objects, click the vSphere Hosts and Clusters container object.

From here, you can expand all the way from the vSphere World down to individual VMs.





Appendix

For ease of use, as you click up and down this branch, the UI will stay in context on the object selected in the tree on the left.

To view the capacity remaining for the vSphere World, cluster, and VMs, click Analysis , then

Capacity Remaining on the right. As you click through the navigation tree branches on the left, the Capacity Remaining tab on the right reflects the newly selected object. vSphere World:

Cluster:

VM:





If at any point, you find yourself in a part of the tree you do not want, click Home .

Appendix





Appendix

Working with Views and Reports

You can read the content below to learn about the new custom reports, or you can watch the following videos:



Create Views with vRealize Operations Manager



Create Reports with vRealize Operations Manager



VMware vRealize Operations - Custom Dashboard, Views and Reports

Views and reports must be run from context. Views and reports are built to present metric data from a specific subject (i.e., cluster, VM, datastore). This means, when an object or an object container is highlighted in the navigation tree, only views or reports will show for the valid subject types.

Example: Highlight the vSphere world again in the navigation tree, and then expand to a cluster.

In the right pane, click the Details tab and then click Views . Choose the view you want to look at.

Remember moving up and down the left pane changes the right pain views available for the object or container object you select.





The flow is the same for reports.

Appendix





Appendix

How to Work with Alerts

You can read about alerting in the content below, or you can watch the following videos:



VMware vRealize Operations - Alerts, Symptoms, Recommendations and Actions



Create Alert Definitions for vRealize Operations Manager

Alerts are the mainstay of vRealize Operations Manager 6. Alerts gather information from the entire vSphere ecosystem and present a single correlated view, drastically reducing MTTI and

MTTR. Alerts are there to make everything easier for you because they tell you:



There is an issue



What symptoms caused the issue

 What’s being impacted



Recommendations on how to fix it



And an action button to run the fix

When you first log in, you start at the Recommendations Dashboard . This is the first place you will begin to see the value of alerts. This dashboard shows alerts for a selected object and its child resources across all areas of Health, Risk, and Efficiency.

Alerts and their associated actions are customizable. VMware, or our partner professional services teams, may be leveraged for this.





Appendix

You can also go to the Alerts screen to see all of the alerts in the system. This may be a quicker and easier way to look for problems and issues. Just click the Alert quick link at the top left and then choose the alert area of interest (in this case Risk ).

Once you have found the alert, simply click on the alert name or the View Details link to drill into the alert.





Appendix

In the example above, we clicked on an alert for CPU Contention on a VM caused by Co stop. When we drill into the alert, we are taken to the Alert Summary page . Here we can review the alert details, symptoms, and recommendations associated with the alert to help us remediate the issues.

From here, you can expand and review some of the symptoms associated with the alert. Some of these symptoms are hard thresholds, based on VMware best practices, but many are using vRealize Operations Dynamic Thresholds to show when metrics are acting abnormally.





Appendix

Discuss the recommendation(s) for the alert. (Note: In many cases, multiple recommendations are provided to allow for greater flexibility. It’s important to also note that all vRealize Operations

Manager alerts come with recommendations on how to fix the issue at hand.)





Appendix

For many recommendations, there will be an associated remediation action button that will allow you to immediately respond.

This single alert view correlates relationships, showing impact to other systems as well as providing business information like ownership of the VM and the applications in which it participates. vRealize Operations Manager provides the ability to take a dive deep into individual metrics if needed —all in a single toolset.





Evaluation Guide

vSphere with Operations

Management 6 - vRealize

Operations Manager

Evaluation Guide

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Evaluation Installation and Setup

Installing the OVA

Express Installation and Initial Configuration Wizard

Setting up vSphere Hardening Compliance

Quick Link

Evaluation Phases

Phase 1: Day 1 – 15 to 20 minutes after install

Finding and Fixing Misconfigurations

Ensuring VMware Hardening Compliance

Resolving Storage Latency Due to Snapshots

Resolving Resource Contention

Resolving Virtual Environment Faults

Phase 2: 15 Days after install

Resolving Storage Latency

Resolving Problems Based on Learned Behaviors

Phase 3: 1 Month after install

Understanding and Analyzing Capacity and Risk

Improving Utilization and Optimizing Resources

Capacity Forecasting

Appendix

Navigating the UI Efficiently

Working with Views and Reports

How to Work with Alerts

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