vCloud Director is defiantly one of my favorites. It has lots of use cases, accessible API for orchestration and once you get all the different network concepts you are pretty much good to go, but how do you manage all of it in an efficient manner?
The one thing I was always missing was a comprehensive monitoring for it, especially on the Organization Virtual Datacenter (OvDC) level. Luckily, I got vC Ops on my side!
A bit of background
In large vCloud environments there can be tens or even hundreds OvDC’s deployed, all ready to serve end users. One of my customers holds an environment just like that with around 50 organizations with each one managed by a single OvDC administrator.
Allocating resources for paying customers is what it’s all about but what about giving the OvDC admin a better way to monitor and manage the Org resources? Without vSphere access permissions the only way for him to do this is via the vCloud portal.
At the end of this multi-part blog post series you will hopefully be able provide the organization admin an all-around vC Ops Custom Dashboard which will serve as a comprehensive solution for several use cases and requirements:
- Being able to perform resources capacity control and planning.
- Perform VM optimization and avoiding resources capacity waste.
- Monitor all the OvDC resources from top to bottom – OvDC > vApps > VMs > Storage.
Installing the vCloud Adapter
First thing first, we need to install the vCloud adapter so vC Ops will be able to discover vCloud logical inventory structure and resource kinds such as Provider vDC, Organization vDC and vApps.
Disclaimer: in its current version, the vCloud adapter do not have full API access to vCloud portal and it is not fully aware to vCloud’s different allocation models (Allocation Pool, Pay-As-You-Go and Reservation Pool). During this series, we will create several vC Ops Super Metrics in order to compensate it.
- Download the adapter PAK file: ftp://ftp.integrien.com/VCOPS-VMware_Product_Adapters/VMware-vCD/
- Before continuing, make sure you have the vC Ops vApp backup available or at least make sure to take a snapshot before moving forward with the process.
- Login to vC Ops Admin interface: https://vCOps-UI-VM-Address/admin and go to the Update tab, Browse for the PAK file and select it.
- Click the Update button, confirm the installation process, accept the EULA terms and hit the OK button.
- Once again, confirm the installation process. This will log you out of the Admin interface and will log you back in after the import has finished.
- Login to vC Ops Custom UI web page: https://vCOps-UI-VM-Address/vcops-custom and go to the Admin > Support tab. Under the Adapters Info section, hit the Describe button and confirm the describe process.
- Verify the adapter is listed properly and you are done with the installation part.
Connect the Adapter to vCloud Cells
In order for the adapter to discover the vCloud resource kinds and start collecting metrics we need to connect it to the vCloud cell (or cells).
- Go to the Environment > Configurations > Adapter Instances.
- In the Adapter Instances click the “Add new adapter instance” button.
- In the Adapter Kind drop-down menu select the vCloud Adapter and click the Add button in order to create new credential configuration.
- Select a name for the adapter instance and provide an account with administrative rights to vCloud portal.
- Enter your vCloud cell IP address or FQDN, leave the Auto Discovery set to true and select the credential set you have just created. Click the Test button to verify the connection was successful.
If a public REST API base URL is assigned in vCloud Director, type the public address. For example, if the VCD public REST API base URL is https://vcloud.somehost.com, type vcloud.somehost.com.
- Go to Environment > Environment Overview. Notice that new adapter instance was added under adapter instances.
For more info on how to configure vCloud adapter you can check out the VMware vCloud Director Adapter Installation and Configuration Guide PDF. In the next part for this series we will go over the OOTB metrics and create the first set of vCloud resource kinds Super Metrics that will be used during this series.
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