By: Kyle Wassink, Blue Medora
Converged infrastructure is becoming commonplace in IT environments, and for good reason. Prevalidated compliance between hardware layers, bundled hardware optimizations, and ease of scalability have numerous benefits to the adopting organizations, both financially and technically. These benefits, along with the solid track record of NetApp and Cisco hardware, have made FlexPod a great solution for companies looking to move to a converged infrastructure model.
While FlexPod offers converged hardware, the same cannot be said about converged monitoring of the hardware. Many organizations are still using separate applications to monitor the compute layer, storage layer, and network layer, thus limiting their ROI from convergence. VMware vRealize Operations and Blue Medora Management Packs address this monitoring gap and enable a truly converged infrastructure, both at the hardware and software layers.
Converged Monitoring
VMware vRealize Operations is the perfect platform for converged monitoring with great out-of-the-box functionality, as well as powerful customization opportunities. You can monitor your FlexPod environment in vRealize Operations even if there aren’t any VMware workloads! Of course, with VMware running on FlexPod you get visibility into the virtualization layer out-of-the-box.
To gain visibility into your FlexPod environment within vRealize Operations simply install the Blue Medora Management Packs for NetApp Storage, Cisco UCS, and Cisco Nexus. Each of these packs handles the relationship mapping necessary to tie the layers together, as well as provides in-depth customization for layer-specific troubleshooting. Adding the FlexPod bundle provides additional integrations such as FlexPod-specific capacity planning, alerting, and dashboards.
With VMware and Blue Medora you get a robust solution to FlexPod monitoring that allows your compute, storage, and network teams to work together with ease. Whether you’re using the capacity planning capabilities to determine future load on the NetApp and Nexus components or troubleshooting a problem with UCS, having all the necessary data in a single tool provides efficiency that was not previously possible.
Management Pack for NetApp Storage
The Management Pack for NetApp Storage provides deep visibility into the NetApp portion of your FlexPod environment. Your storage admin will love the 15 out-of-the-box dashboards, built-in capacity planning, hundreds of metrics, and automatic relationship mapping.
Management Pack for Cisco UCS
The Management Pack for Cisco UCS provides visibility into the compute layer of your FlexPod. Simplify your server admin’s responsibilities with the advanced alerting and dashboards in this pack, as well as the direct relationships to the VMware layer.
Management Pack for Cisco Nexus
The Management Pack for Cisco Nexus pulls in the final layer of your FlexPod environment: your networking. The comprehensive port and switch monitoring capabilities will provide a complete picture of your FlexPod network.
If you would like more information or a free trial of the management packs used to monitor FlexPod, visit the Bundle for FlexPod product page or e-mail [email protected] with questions or inquiries. Faster MTTR. More accurate capacity planning. Comprehensive monitoring. It’s all possible with the FlexPod monitoring solution from Blue Medora.
