In my series of blog posts on VMware vRealize Operations and the vRealize Suite, I’ve talked a lot about running vROps but all of it has been on-premises…. up until now!
I must admit that I’m excited about all that is possible with VMware Cloud on AWS and to manage the VMC infrastructure, the recommended tool is vRealize Operations in VMC. In this post, I’ll cover all that is possible with vROps on VMC. Before I show you how to manage VMC at scale with vROps let’s first talk about VMware Cloud Management tools that can enable you to make the move to VMC.
It’s important to point out that the vRealize Suite isn’t just for monitoring your vSphere infrastructure running in VMC after you migrate. VMware also has tools for planning a cloud migration and actually performing the migration. For example, VMware’s tools can:
- identify capacity shortages before they happen
- compare the cost of multiple clouds to determine the best fit for your company
- discover application dependencies to determine what needs to be moved
- model the performance after the migration to determine whether or not enough capacity will be available
- and, post-migration, confirm that that the right workloads and dependencies have been migrated
Pre-Migration Assessment
Many people don’t know that VMware’s vRealize Business for Cloud can help you to create migration scenarios, select the virtual machines to be migrated, and get capacity and cost information, prior to a migration.
In the graphic below, you can see how, with vRealize Business for Cloud, you can perform a VMware Cloud on AWS Assessment scenario to analyze what you would require to make the jump to VMC. Common scenarios are simply migrating applications, retiring full data centers, or hardware refresh.
In the next graphic, you can see how vRealize Business can help you to select the right VMs to migrate and compare the costs.
Finally, here is what it looks like to use vRealize Business for Cloud to determine capacity and cost requirements for making the jump to VMware Cloud on AWS.
What To Migrate?
When it comes to what exactly you need to migrate, vRealize Business for Cloud can help you to make the financial determinations but vRealize Network Insight can help you to identify the application, network, and VM dependencies before you move those applications.
As you see below, vRNI can help you to identify the flow of traffic between the VMs and applications that are being migrated to ensure you know who is talking to what and that, once migrated, all necessary network traffic conversations will continue to flow.
vRealize Network Insight can help you to determine what services are being accessed by a specific application.
With vRNI, you’ll also learn what services are associated with a specific application.
And finally, you’ll learn the network constraints that you need to be aware of before you move the application to VMC.
Managing VMware Cloud with vRealize Operations
Once you migrate applications to VMC, you need to still be managing capacity and performance. While most issues can be mitigated proactively, you still need vROps to prevent those problems before they happen and to quickly remediate any unexpected issues that come up.
Here’s a cool animated graphic I put together that shows…
- DRS management with vROps in VMC
- vROps optimizing VMC resources
- Troubleshooting workloads in VMC
- Managing capacity in VMware Cloud
- Migrating VM workloads within VMC
- Managing vSAN in VMC with vROps
Next steps- learn more about VMware Cloud on AWS and VMware vRealize Suite!
Also – stay tuned for more posts here on the VMware Cloud Management Blog!
