VMware is pleased to announce VMware Skyline Health for vSAN, which unifies two in-product support offerings, vSAN Health and Skyline. Users will experience less downtime due to new, proactive Skyline notifications as well as resolve issues faster from a single source of support. Skyline Health for vSAN provides self-service findings for configuration, patches, upgrades, and security for vSAN 6.7 and later. All customers with active support are entitled to Skyline Health for vSAN.
Cloud Based Analytics Prevent Issues Before They Arise
Online maps, especially on smartphones, have greatly simplified people’s lives; prior to online maps, many people had local Key maps and national atlases in their cars for long road trips. However, before online maps integrated traffic information, users still needed to use AM radio or the local TV station to plan the fastest route. By integrating traffic information and proactively re-routing drivers, online maps have greatly reduced travel times and made travel much more efficient.
Similarly, many hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) adopters find that vSAN provides a more stable, available solution than their previous storage infrastructure. However, as business demands continue to grow on IT, any unplanned downtime is unacceptable, so IT vendors need to proactively notify and “re-route” admins around pitfalls. To keep infrastructure available, VMware continues to innovate by integrating heath checks, simulations and other preventative measures throughout the product. VMware Skyline, launched in 2017, was VMware’s first step at providing proactive support notifications to users.
VMware Skyline™ is a proactive support technology available to customers with an active support subscription. Skyline automatically and more securely collects, aggregates and analyzes customer-specific product usage data to proactively identify potential issues and improve time-to-resolution. Skyline’s analytics are based on a robust rules engine and machine-learning engine. The rules engine is where an ever-growing library of support intelligence, product knowledge and logic are stored to analyze inbound streams of product information. VMware uses data collected by Skyline to proactively identify potential issues and perform research analysis for service requests to improve the overall stability and reliability of your VMware environment.
Skyline Health for vSAN provides findings based on Skyline data from thousands of vSAN deployments, but it does not require the Skyline Collector, meaning no data needs to be sent to VMware to receive the benefits of Skyline Health for vSAN. Skyline findings include rules based on KB articles as well as best practices. To get the most out of Skyline health, vCenter must be connected online and enrolled in the Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP), but customers can still receive some health checks offline. “Skyline Health” replaces “Health” in the vSAN user interface and contains both Skyline findings as well as the vSAN Health summary. Skyline Health will be available with vSphere 6.7P01 (or vSAN 6.7 U3a) and above.
Get the most out of VMware Skyline
For customers that want a more holistic proactive support experience, VMware also offers Skyline Advisor proactive support experience for customers with Production and Premier support subscriptions. Skyline Advisor includes cross-product support for vSphere, vSAN, NSX, vROps, Horizon and auto-tags VVD, VMware Cloud Foundation as well as for Dell EMC VxRail, a jointly engineered hyperconverged system. Skyline Advisor extends proactive support to older versions of VMware products, supporting vSphere versions back to 5.5. Customers also get LogAssist™, which automates the collection of logs in the event of a support request. Premier support customers receive all of those key capabilities plus advanced findings, and white glove troubleshooting and remediation.
Next Steps
To learn more about Skyline, visit the website
To learn more about vSAN Health, read the blog
To learn more about vSAN, visit the vSAN page
Take our vSAN 6.7 Hands-On Lab here, and our vSAN 6.7 Advanced Hands-On Lab here!
