In my continuing series on the vRealize Suite, I’ve been focusing recently on all the new features in vRealize Operations 6.6. In my last post I covered the New Capacity Dashboards in VMware vRealize Operations 6.6 and, before that, the 5 Must Knows of Automated Workload Balancing with vRealize Operations and the Top 7 Dashboards in vRealize Operations 6.6. In this post, we’ll take a sidestep from all the greatness in the new vROps 6.6 and talk about a really cool new management pack for vROps!
Whether you are doing cutting edge datacenter stuff with microservices or whether you are running more traditional apps in your virtual machines you want to know what’s running inside your VMs and how those VMs are dependant on one another. Too many shops have hundreds or thousands of VMs and struggle to identify what applications run in those VMs, what would happen if certain VMs are down, and what the application dependencies are. These are must-knows for any VMware Admin / Datacenter Admin when it comes to preventing problems before they happen, troubleshooting problems when they do happen, and planning for things like application scalability, cloud migration, or disaster recovery. In the past VMware had offered the vRealize Infrastructure Navigator (aka VIN) to identify these dependencies.
Recently, VMware has launched a new solution — and much better solution — for identifying running applications in virtual machines and the dependencies between those applications. VMware’s new solution is the vRealize Operations Service Discovery Management Pack. This new management pack discovers all the services running in each VM and then builds a relationship or dependencies between services from different VMs, based on the network communication.
The management pack can create dynamic applications based on the network communication between the services and brings in the functionality into VMWare vRealize Operations Manager which was earlier provided by VMWare vRealize Infrastructure Navigator (VIN).
I’ve been reading through the vRealize Operations Service Discovery Management Pack 1.0 documentation and it’s very easy to add to your vRealize Operations. Of course, first, you’d want to make sure that you have vRealize Operations Manager already installed / upgraded to the latest version.
The goals of the vRealize Operations Service Discovery Management Pack are to provide you:
- Auto-discovery of services running on Virtual Machines
- Auto-discovery of relationships and dependencies between Virtual Machines
- Dynamic Application creation
According to the VMware Solutions Exchange VSX), you’ll get answers to the following questions by using the vRealize Operations Service Discovery Management Pack :
- What kind of services are running on each VM in your environment? For example, MySQL, Apache Tomcat etc.
- Which VM is a part of an application?
- What is the impact of shutting down or moving a VM?
- What is the impact of an incident and the right escalation path for a problem?
- Which VMs are used to migrate an application?
- What applications are impacted by a planned outage on a VM or an infrastructure component?
- How does the users know the type of infrastructure, if an application is running on it?
- Which VMs are part of a Recovery Plan or Protection Group for Site Recovery or Disaster Recovery?
- Are there any VMs that require protection for DR?
You can download the the vRealize Operations Service Discovery Management Pack here.
You can download the free trial of the new vRealize Operations 6.6 or try the free vROps 6.6 VMware Hands-On-Lab.
Also, checkout the YouTube PlayList on vROps Dashboards, with over 26 videos on the many Dashboards available in vROps 6.6 !
To learn more about the latest and greatest in the vRealize Suite, stay tuned to the VMware Cloud Management Blog !
