I’m very excited to introduce the very new vSAN ENT+ hard bundle for your hyperconverged data center. Better together, VMware vSAN v6.7 and vRealize Operations v7.5 makes it easy to manage your ‘day one’ and ‘day two’ HCI operations. This bundled release allows IT Admins to administer their infrastructure more efficiently through:
- vSAN-aware Workload Placement and Balancing
- Continuous Capacity & Cost Optimization
- Intelligent Remediation
- Deduplication, Compression, Encryption
- vSAN Compliance Management
Why Hyperconverged Infrastructure?
Old legacy infrastructures of siloed storage, network, and compute were expensive, inefficient and slow to meet requirements of modern enterprise applications. This approach requires domain expertise from different IT functions to collaborate on different projects, share ownership, and complete strategic maintenance upgrades with minimal to zero production downtime.
Hyperconvergence introduced a new software defined IT framework that essentially combined these siloes into a tightly integrated system to minimize datacenter complexities and increase resource scalability. The modular approach ensures you have complete redundancy and availability each time you scale out the HCI cluster, regardless of size. This makes it attractive as it eliminates the need to separately manage and configure servers, storage, and network devices along with the costly dependence of vendors or IT consultants. And most importantly, a guarantee that the system components will all work together and can be easily installed and managed with centralized management interface.
VMware vSAN + vRealize Operations
When scaling out new and existing infrastructure, IT Directors are checking off 3 major pillars to meet the modern datacenter transformation:
- Agile HCI Infrastructure
- Scale system resources and applications in your hybrid and multi cloud environments
- Intelligent and Adaptive Operations
- Enhance operational efficiency by automating, scheduling and predicting data center needs
- Modern Data Visualization and Protection
- Maintain compliance requirements and service level agreements with business continuity
With its deep integration and data visualization, vSAN with vRealize Operations provides IT Admins with a comprehensive view of their virtualized infrastructure, applications and storage metrics. Additionally, you have the option to access and manage vSAN with vROps in one of two methods:
With the embedded vRealize Operations plugin for vCenter, there is a guided deployment for users to easily configure a new vROps instance, or to simply connect to an existing vROps instance. This option provides you with six purpose-built dashboards that consolidate vROps intelligence into vCenter to view performance and capacity metrics for your vSphere and vSAN environments.
For full-stack vSAN capacity management and troubleshooting, IT Professionals can use the native vROps interface to realize the full ‘Self-Driving’ experience. This includes vSAN dashboards that enable the ability to schedule, automate, or manually configure workload placement and balancing settings among many other actionable settings like integrated compliance, intelligent remediation, and predictive DRS.
What’s New
Workload Optimization
vRealize Operations is the ONLY product to deliver a fully automated vSAN aware workload optimization engine!
Automate, schedule, or manually optimize your datacenter by balancing and moving workloads across vSphere clusters to avoid hot spots and performance issues. vRealize Operations can also consolidate your workloads into fewer clusters while maintaining application performance.
vRealize Operations workload optimization can also work within the boundaries of your business such as SLA, compliance, or licensing restrictions.
Continuous Optimization
vRealize Operation’s real time capacity analytics engine is forward looking to help customers optimize their environment to be proactive in capacity management. vROps analyzes your data and can quickly alert customers if they start running out of capacity or resources.
vSAN capacity dashboards shows the percentage remaining for your vSAN cluster resources such as CPU, memory, and storage. Plus predictive analytics can calculate when resources will run out of capacity using historical trends which helps users plan for future hardware purchases.
Intelligent Remediation
As your vSAN cluster grows in size and complexity, there might be anomalies that may require intuitive troubleshooting dashboards and other system recommendations.
With top level views of stretched clusters, you can dive into:
Stretched cluster to display metrics
- Time remaining
- Capacity remaining
- Utilization
Cluster and host specific elements
- Disks
- Disk groups
- Caching
- Host resource usage
Key metrics found here provide visualization of relationships between VMs, disk groups, and vSAN clusters to quickly resolve contention and capacity issues. And with vRealize Log Insight, you can analyze rich log data to help pinpoint root causes of problems or identify issues before they become critical errors.
Deduplication/Compression/Encryption
Visualize the capacity savings you gain by enabling services like data deduplication and compression. You get a side-by-side comparison to show ratios and capacity savings – and also usage metrics with or without deduplication enabled.
vSAN encryption protects your data at rest. Maintain compliance of VM’s should they ever get orphaned as data cannot be decrypted without KMS server authentication from vCenter.
Compliance
Integrate compliance with built-in templates to measure your infrastructure against popular standards such as HIPPA, PCI, ISO, FISMA, DISA, and CIS. You can even create your own custom polices to compare your environment against internal standards. The dashboard will display all the compliant vs non-compliant objects – see individual alerts and objects that are in violation and what those violations rules are such as NTP, network mis-configurations, or required service updates. Tier 1 database backup failed last night? You’ll get a non-compliant alert as well.
The idea is that once you apply polices, vROps continuously monitors your data center and alerts you if set configurations drifts. Manually fix the violated rules or configure automated remediation for the non-compliant errors.
Better Together
Businesses need to focus on their applications and data services that deliver direct value to their customers. They simply don’t have the time or resources to spend on managing systems that don’t have direct value.
If you’re looking to maximize efficiency to operationalize management and automate intelligence in your modern hyper-converged infrastructure, this is where vSAN and vROps come hand in hand, better together than without each other!
