Greg Hohertz, Blue Medora
Maintenance mode is a feature of vRealize Operations Manager (vROps), which prevents a resource from presenting misleading data or status during planned changes or unscheduled outages to the system’s software or hardware. In this blog, we’ll take a look at a couple ways to place resources in maintenance.
Manually Placing a Resource in Maintenance Mode
The simplest way to place a resource into maintenance is manually, via the Administration interface of vROps. Log into vRealize Operations and navigate to Administration, then Inventory Explorer (in 6.0.x it is called Environment Explorer). From here, you can search for the resource you would like to put into maintenance. Note that the first column contains the name of the resource, the second column the adapter type, and the third is object type.
Figure 1 – Manually Starting Maintenance Mode – Finding the Resource
Once you’ve found the resource you’d like to place into maintenance, left-click on the row. Next, click on the Start Maintenance button in the menu bar. You’ll be presented with a dialog box which will ask you if you’d like to end maintenance on the resource yourself (manually), or if you’d like to end it automatically, either after x minutes or on a specific date.
Figure 2 – Manually Starting Maintenance Mode – Starting Maintenance
To manually end maintenance on the resource, you would navigate to this same location, find the resource, then click on the End Maintenance button.
Using Maintenance Schedules to Schedule Recurring Maintenance
Maintenance Schedules can be used to schedule maintenance for a resource which undergoes maintenance at a fixed interval. For example, a database might perform maintenance every Friday from 8pm to 9pm. A maintenance schedule can be created so that vROps does not show misleading data or health status during the scheduled outage.
To create a maintenance schedule, navigate to Administration and then Maintenance Schedules, then click on the Add (green plus sign) icon in the toolbar. Enter a friendly name for this maintenance schedule. You may want to come up with a naming standard so that the schedule can be easily identified in the future. Enter the maintenance window by indicating a start time and an end time. Note that you can also use days to indicate maintenance that extends a day or more. Next, specify the recurrence pattern. In our example, I’m creating a database maintenance window from 20:00 to 21:00, weekly, on Friday.
Figure 3 – Creating a Maintenance Schedule
Next, this newly created maintenance schedule will need to be assigned to my database resource. To accomplish this, I’ll need to either create a new database policy which contains the database(s) I wish to apply maintenance to, or use a pre-existing policy which contains the databases in question. To create a new policy, navigate to Administration then Policies and select the Policy Library tab. Click on the green plus sign to create a new policy and give it a friendly name such as “Production Databases”. Next, select Analysis Settings then filter the resources you’d like to apply the maintenance schedule to. In this example, we’ll select MS SQL Server.
Figure 4 – Applying the Maintenance Schedule to the Policy
Expand the Microsoft SQL Server until you find Time Range. Click on the lock to unlock this section for this policy. Use the drop down next to Maintenance Schedule to select your newly created maintenance schedule, then click Save.
With maintenance schedules in place, you’ll no longer receive those false alerts during the Friday maintenance schedules on these databases. You may consider additionally adding the virtual machine and/or Endpoint Operations Agent to this same schedule, so that the database, operating system, and virtual machine all have monitoring suppressed during this scheduled maintenance.
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