VMware’s vRealize Operations Manager (vROps) has traditionally required a fair amount of horsepower and some time to deploy into vSphere infrastructure (which isn’t surprising as it’s such a powerful performance and capacity management tool). What this meant is that if you wanted to get some hands-on experience or do some testing with vROps you usually had to have a vSphere host to deploy it onto (or use VMware’s Hands-On Labs).
Running vRealize Operations Manager in a VMware Fusion Lab
However, with the latest version of vRealize Operations 6.x and with today’s more powerful desktop / laptop systems, it’s not hard to deploy vROps into a virtual VMware Fusion lab. vROps now deploys as a single virtual machine and offers an express mode configuration. My new lab environment is comprised of a single iMac with 32GB of RAM, an i7 CPU, and a 1TB PCIe flash drive. With VMware Fusion on top of Mac OS X, I am able to run the following VMs in a virtual vSphere lab, providing a nice 2 host vSphere cluster managed by vCenter-
- 2 x ESXi VMs with 8GB of RAM each
- vCenter server for Windows VM with 6 GB of RAM
- Windows AD/DNS/DHCP VM with 2 GB of RAM
To learn more about vRealize Operations and do some testing (and write more blog posts for this Cloud Management blog), I wanted to have the latest vRealize Operations Manager (6.0.2 at the time of this blog post) up and running in this virtual environment and I was unsure if I had the resources, how it woudl perform, and even if the vROps OVA (designed for ESXi deployment) would deploy in VMware Fusion.
I was happy to find out that vROps not only worked but it deployed faster than I had ever seen it deploy and it ran great. To show you how to do it in your own lab, step by step, here are the steps that I walk you through in the video above:
- Downloading the vRealize Operations 6.x OVA virtual appliance
- Importing the vROps OVA into VMware Fusion (and retrying when the error comes up)
- Reconfiguring the virtual appliance to run in less RAM (8GB in my case), and connecting the virtual network adapter to a new virtual network
- Powering on vROps, assigning an admin password, and performing the initial configuration
- Connecting vROps to vCenter by providing the vCenter DNS name /IP address and username / password credentials
Enjoy the video!
Please use the comments below to provide feedback and let me know what other videos you’d like to see here on the VMware Cloud Management Blog!
