With the release of vRealize Operations 8.1, we introduced support for vSphere 7 for Kubernetes. This includes auto-discovery of new object types, such as Supervisor Clusters, Namespaces, vSphere Pods and Tanzu Kubernetes clusters. This is natively built in to the vCenter adapter in vRealize Operations, so there is nothing you need to do other than configure the adapter as you normally would. The integration allows virtual administrators to manage capacity and performance of Kubernetes infrastructure along side the traditional virtual infrastructure. This way, they can provide support for modern applications by reducing complexity of managing Kubernetes and expanding operational visibility to containers.

In this blog, I will show you what the integration looks like and the content provided out of the box to enable Container Operations for your DevOps teams.

Native Support

If you have investigated vSphere 7 with Kubernetes, you know that there are a new of new vSphere objects that extend support for running modern applications. These slip right into the vSphere inventory tree and in vRealize Operations, you will see them in the environment view.

Namespaces, vSphere Pods, Supervisor Clusters and Tanzu Kubernetes clusters are visible with their own summary tab customized for each object type (which is another new feature in vRealize Operations 8.1). Here is another example of the summary tab for a vSphere Pod.

Speaking of cluster objects, when you enable Workload Management in a vSphere 7 cluster, vRealize Operations is aware of this status and it will be reflected in the cluster object properties. Here is an example of the summary tab for a vSphere cluster with Workload Management enabled.

As you would expect, you get AI powered capacity management capabilities for these new objects just as you have for the traditional vSphere infrastructure. You can see both time and capacity remaining projections for Supervisor Clusters and vSphere Pods.

New Out of the Box Content

You know, vRealize Operations always gives you content to get you started. Included with this native integration are new dashboards, alerts, reports, and views. There are two fantastic new dashboards. Workload Management Inventory which gives you summary information of the Workload Management environment as well as detailed information for the new object types. Most importantly, you can easily view relationships between the container world and the underlying vSphere infrastructure to make it easier to troubleshoot and investigate resource usage.

The Workload Management Configuration dashboard provides configuration details for your Workload Management environment. Here you can manage configuration drift and reduce risk related to outdated or incompatible versions and configurations.

In addition to these new dashboards, we have also included nine new reports for capacity, configuration and inventory of vSphere Pods, Supervisor Clusters, Tanzu Kubernetes clusters and Namespaces. You also get 18 new alerts for vSphere Pods for notification of performance issues with storage and compute, as well as availability and capacity problems.

vRealize Operations is Container Operations

I think you will agree that the native vSphere 7 with Kubernetes integrations in vRealize Operations 8.1 sets the standard for container platforms running on vSphere. Also, keep in mind that we continue to provide management packs for traditional Kubernetes deployments with the Management Pack for Container Monitoring. So, however you choose to provide container platform services, vRealize Operations has you covered.