In my last post, I covered what the vC Ops Custom Interface is and why you should care about it. In this post, I’d like to cover something that I think is just plain “cool”. But first, a little background…
Recently, VMware has rebranded vCenter Operations Management Suite as vRealize Operations – as part of the comprehensive rebranding of all its Management and Automation solutions under the vRealize family name. And while the individual, standalone products are still available, VMware has aligned its management offerings under two main solutions. The first one is vRealize Operations Insight (vROI), which is a bundled package of vRealize Operations Advanced edition and vRealize Log Insight. So that’s your comprehensive IT operations management solution. The second one is the vRealize Suite, which is a cloud management platform for the hybrid cloud, and includes vRealize Automation, vRealize Operations, vRealize Log Insight, and vRealize Business.
So how can you get access to the new vRealize Operations and use it, first hand, without ever having to install it? (now we’re getting to the cool part) Fortunately, the smart people at VMware’s Hands On Lab have made the entire vRealize Suite available, for free, to the public in a real lab, already installed, and wrapped with some great lab instructions.
I thought it was so cool, I had to check it out myself.
vRealize Operations (vROps) In the Hands On Labs
Today, VMware’s HoL offers 44 labs with 6 of those covering components of the vRealize Suite. Specifically, the 6 labs are:
- HOL-HBD-1483 – vCloud Air – Manage Your Cloud
- HOL-MBL-1452 – Horizon View – Use Cases
- HOL-SDC-1401 – Cloud Management with vRealize Operations
- HOL-SDC-1411 – IT Cost Transparency with ITBM
- HOL-SDC-1421 – Brokering IT Services and Applications with vCloud Automation Center
- HOL-SDC-1426 – Log Insight in the Real World!
These labs cover the new features of vRealize Operations and vRealize Log Insight, how vRealize Operations can help to manage Horizon View performance, how vRealize Operations can be used to manage vCloud Air, and more.
vRealize Operations (vROps) New Features in VMware HoL
As I most wanted to see the new vRealize Operations features, I selected the lab that I thought would best allow me to see those features and configure them myself. Because of that, I chose HOL-SDC-1401.
The new vRealize Operations and vRealize Log Insight both have a LOT of new features so don’t expect to see them all and configure them all in, let’s say, a short 30 minute lab. In fact, this lab gives you roughly 4.5 hours of tasks to perform and there are still 5 other labs related to various vRealize Suite components. In this lab, I honed in on the best and fastest ways to see what the all-new vROps could do for me.
I started by looking at what has changed with the user interface. I immediately noticed the new dashboard list and numerous new dashboards with ways to predict problems before they happen, to view recommendations for improvement, and to analyze the vSphere infrastructure.
Many of the user interface changes that I noticed in the new standard vROps interface have come from the old vC Ops custom user interface. With the new vRealize Operations 6.0 version, the standard and custom user interfaces have been integrated into one. In my opinion, this is a huge improvement as the custom UI was so powerful and offered so many ways to analyze the virtual infrastructure. Not only has the UI been consolidated but vRealize Operations Manager 6.0 has consolidated the old analytics and UI virtual VMs down to a single unified virtual appliance.
One of the vSphere analysis views that I like is the “Top 25” view, showing things like the “top 25 capacity risk VMs”, the “top 25 stressed VMs”, the “top 25 low time remaining VMs”, and the “top 25 over sized VMs”.
Just because vRealize Operations has a new unified interface, doesn’t mean that you can’t customize it. What you end up with is, essentially, an all new custom interface for all versions of vRealize Operations. To add your own dashboard and start customizing the vROps dashboards, just go to Actions and click to Create New Dashboard.
Another new feature that I like is the vastly improved alerting. Alerts are now derived from one or more symptoms that can be defined with multiple conditions to ensure it only fires when it is really needed. For each of the alerts built into vRealize Operations Manager, there is now a recommendation to help you resolve it.
These are just a few of the many improvements in the new vRealize Operations (I didn’t even have time to cover vRealize Log Insight). There are simply too many features to cover in this blog so I recommend that you-
- Watch videos about the new vROps, found in Himanshu Singh’s post – Introducing vRealize Operations 6.0 – Delivering Intelligent Operations From Apps to Storage
- Try the new vRealize Hand On Labs for yourself to gain hands-on experience with the new vROps even BEFORE it’s available for download and purchase – visit VMware Hands On Labs here!
