By: Matthew Rumph, Blue Medora
One of the most popular management packs for VMware vRealize Operations has received another update this week. Blue Medora’s vRealize Operations Management Pack for Cisco UCS has been updated to include many additional features such as new resource kinds, relationships and more. Let’s walk through the components of the update to understand what value these new features could bring to your Cisco UCS environment.
Brand New Resource Kinds and Views
The majority of the updates for this Management Pack were focused on new resource kinds and the metrics related to them. The new resource kinds include:
- Ethernet Port
- Port Channel
- Fiber Channel Port
- Virtual Network Interface Card (vNIC)
- Virtual Host Bus Adapter (vHBA)
With the addition of these five new resource kinds and 276 metrics related to UCS port traffic, the Management Pack for Cisco UCS has become an even more powerful monitoring solution.
The new metrics and resource kinds provide the solid foundation of this Management Pack, including vRealize capabilities such as Views and Reports. Below is an example of the out-of-the-box views you will see when using Blue Medora’s Management Pack for Cisco UCS.
New Cisco UCS Traffic Report
As mentioned above, with additional resource kinds and metrics comes the ability to build more out-of-the-box reports and dashboards. Specifically, the Management Pack will now contain an additional report that can be generated to provide summary details on the Cisco UCS traffic in your environment. Like all vRealize Operations reports, this summary report may be run individually or scheduled to run at recurring times.
New UCS Overview Dashboard
The Overview Dashboard is becoming a standard feature in Blue Medora products as it provides a comprehensive first glance view into your monitored environment. The new Cisco UCS Overview dashboard quickly displays, through heat maps, where issues reside and provides the ability to drill down into the problematic area. This dashboard serves as a great first stop for the Cisco UCS admin.
New Option to Enable Port Collection
Part of the inspiration for adding the new port metrics to this release was feedback we received from the current and potential users of the Management Pack; however, we understand that not every administrator may want these additional 276 metrics collected. For these users that look to maintain a smaller footprint in their environment, we’ve added the ability in the adapter configuration to disable the collection of these metrics.
To disable the port collection, simply select “No” from the “Enable Ports?” configuration option and restart the adapter.
New Capacity Definition
Another highly anticipated new feature of the Management Pack is the addition of vRealize capacity definitions. This feature adds the ability to view your Cisco UCS chassis total capacity, capacity remaining, and reclaimable capacity. Having this information can be useful for planning future Cisco UCS rollouts and tightening up current deployments.
Updated Traversal Trees for VMware and Cisco UCS Relationships
With the new metrics around ports and traffic, we’ve also taken the existing traversal trees and updated them to help visualize relationships and navigate the different Cisco UCS resource kinds. Now the administrator can easily view which vNICs and vHBAs are related to which Cisco UCS blades.
As Blue Medora’s vROps product portfolio rapidly grows, our commitment is to provide continued quality updates and support of all our management packs for the growing VMware vRealize Operations platform. If you’d like to learn more about Blue Medora’s Management Pack for Cisco UCS or download a free trial, please visit the product page on our website.
