With a joint development effort with the Dell EMC VxRail team, I’m very excited to share general availability of the VxRail MP for vRealize Operations. The Dell EMC VxRail Management Pack for vRealize Operations provides a single, end-to-end view of vSAN clusters powered by the VMware vRealize Operations Manager AI/ML analytics engine. This helps operationalize your VMware SDDC stack by delivering actionable performance analysis to help detect capacity and performance constraints before they cause negative impacts to your data centers.
The management pack consists of an adapter that collects VxRail events, analytics logic specific to VxRail, and three custom dashboards. These VxRail events are translated into VxRail alerts on vRealize Operations so that users have helpful information to understand health issues along with recommended course of resolution. With custom dashboards, users can easily go to VxRail-specific views to troubleshoot issues and make use of existing vRealize Operations capabilities in the context of VxRail clusters.
By collecting VxRail events, vSAN metrics, configuration details, inventory, and relationship dependency mappings, it also enables customers to define alerts and policies to create their own custom dashboards from a rich collection of data analytics for VxRail clusters.
Prerequisites
- For vROps 8.0:
- vCenter Cloud Account configured for the targeted VxRail cluster.
- vSAN is enabled on vCenter.
- For vROps 7.5:
- vCenter Adapter instance configured for the targeted VxRail cluster.
- vSAN Adapter instance configured for the targeted VxRail cluster.
- VxRail version(s) 4.5.300 and above in addition to all 4.7.x versions.
Installing the VxRail MP:
- Download the PAK file for Management Pack for VxRail from VMware Marketplace, and save that PAK file to a temporary folder on your local system.
- Log in to the vRealize Operations Manager user interface with administrator privileges.
- In the left pane of vRealize Operations Manager, click the Administration icon and click Solutions.
- On the Solutions tab, click the plus sign.
- Browse to locate the temporary folder and select the PAK file.
- Click Upload. The upload might take several minutes.
- Read and accept the EULA and click Next. Installation details appear in the window during the process.
- When the installation is completed, click Finish.
Configuring the VxRail MP:
1. On the menu, click Administration and in the left pane click Solutions.
2. Select VxRail Adapter and click Configure icon.
3. Configure the adapter instance.
4. Click Test Connection to validate the connection.
5. Click Save Settings to add the adapter instance to the list.
6. Verify that the adapter is configured and collecting data by viewing application-related data.
Dashboards
The VxRail Management Pack for vRealize Operations has three dashboards for you to see the:
- VxRail Operations Overview
- VxRail Capacity Overview
- Troubleshoot VxRail
To access the dashboards, navigate to the main menu of VMware vRealize Operations Manager and click Dashboard. Then from the dashboard list, select your desired VxRail dashboard.
VxRail Operations Overview Dashboard
The VxRail Operations Overview dashboard provides an aggregated view of the health and performance of your VxRail clusters. Use this dashboard to get a complete view of your VxRail environment and what components make up the environment.
The widgets in the dashboard help you to understand the utilization and performance patterns for the selected VxRail cluster. The widgets also show the details of cluster storage, cluster compute, cluster wide IOPs, the average cluster wide disk latency, alert volume, cluster throughput, and the maximum latency among the capacity disks.
VxRail Capacity Overview Dashboard
The VxRail Capacity Overview dashboard provides an overview of VxRail storage capacity and savings achieved by enabling deduplication and compression across all VxRail clusters. The widgets in this dashboard show the current and historical use trends, future procurement requirements, the details such as capacity remaining, time remaining, and storage reclamation opportunities to make effective capacity management decisions.
These widgets also show the distribution of use among VxRail disks. You can view these details either as an aggregate or at an individual cluster level.
VxRail Troubleshooting Dashboard
The Troubleshoot VxRail dashboard helps you view the properties of your VxRail cluster and the active alerts on the cluster components. The cluster components include hosts, VMs, or disk groups.
You can select a cluster from the dashboard and then list all the known problems with the objects associated with the cluster. Objects include clusters, datastores, disk groups, physical disks, and VMs served by the selected VxRail cluster.
You can view the key use and performance metrics from the dashboard and the use and performance trend of the cluster for the last 24 hours. You can also view historical issues and analyze the host, disk group, or physical disk.
