Let’s say that you have multiple datacenters around the world, or even just around the United States. Each datacenter (even if it’s a relatively small vSphere-powered datacenter) needs monitoring of performance, capacity planning, and trouble remediation, should the unexpected happen. In the past, you could try to have a single vROps install and use remote collectors however that’s just not practical in many cases and that design has a number of downsides. Alternatively, if you have a decent-sized vSphere infrastructure you want vROps deployed at each there wasn’t a way to get a single unified interface, aka a “single pane of glass”…. until now!
Recently VMware introduced the new Federation Management Pack for vRealize Operations. With the federation management pack added to vROps, you’ll be able to:
- Provide a summary of performance, capacity, and configuration to Senior Executives and Virtual Infrastructure Administrators across all your vSphere environments.
- Provide a unified view of events triggered across the virtual environments into a single pane for making it easier for NOC or Helpdesk to initiate action.
- Create a data warehouse where user selected set of metrics can be stored for data archiving and report use cases.
- Provide summarized views of health and configuration of your Software Defined data center stack. This includes core applications such as VMware vCenter Server, VMware NSX, and VMware vSAN. The solution also covers the management applications such as vRealize Operations Manager, vRealize Log Insight, vRealize Automation, vRealize Business, and VMware Site Recovery Manager.
I gave an example of one use case above but there are numerous other scenarios where the Federation Management pack is a game-changer. For example if you wanted to provide a summary of performance, capacity, and configuration to Senior Executives and Virtual Infrastructure Administrators across all your vSphere environments.
Upon its release, VMware Cloud Management Expert Sunny Dua wrote about the new Federation Management Pack for vROps on his blog. He also created two really excellent videos on how to install, configuration, and use the new Federation Management Pack.
In the first video, Sunny covers installation and configuration-
And in the second video, Sunny covers how to use the Federation Management pack dashboard-
In order to use the Federation Management pack you must have vRealize Operation Manager 6.6 or 6.6.1, and greater. Documentation on the Federation Management pack is available here. I encourage you to try out the new vRealize Operations Federation Management Pack at the VMware Marketplace for yourself!
