A new version of VMware Cloud on AWS MP is now available to monitor your AWS Outposts. The monitoring of AWS outposts is currently available only in the USA Regions AWS US East (N. Virginia) and AWS US West (Oregon).
A couple of conditions for this monitoring to work are
- Any VMC on AWS outpost that you deploy should be connected to one of the AWS Regional Data Centers and one of the supported VMC on AWS data centers as well i.e AWS US East (N. Virginia) or AWS US West (Oregon).
Just like VMware Cloud on AWS, the VMware Cloud console is used to provision a new SDDC. This management pack is ideal for extending VMC on AWS deployments on premises to host latency sensitive apps and allows you access to 200+ regional AWS services. VMC on AWS Outposts use the same ‘Nitro’ infrastructure hardware as VMC on AWS.
This management pack can be used on VMware Aria Operations on-prem (8.6 onwards) as well as on VMware Aria Operations cloud. For official documentation see Configuring VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts in vRealize Operations
So how does this work:
- Open the vCenter via VMC on AWS and install a Cloud Proxy initially.
- You will need 1 public IP – for communication between cloud proxy to VMware Aria Operations cloud
- Associate the public IP to the virtual machine of the cloud proxy.
- Create a NAT rule for the internet to map the public IP to the internal IP of cloud proxy – this allows the cloud proxy to connect and communicate to VMware Aria Operations Cloud and back into the vCenter server
- You also have to create an internal rule for the public IP of the cloud proxy to be allowed for communication i.e. collect data from the VMware Cloud on AWS by this cloud proxy.
- In VMC on AWS go to Inventory Management groups, and add a rule to allow cloud proxy Public IP to communicate with vCenter
Once the MP is configured for VMC on AWS Outposts, the MP auto discovers the underlying vCenter, vSAN and NSX-T however it is the user’s responsibility to configure them along with the deployment and configuration of their Applications, Virtual machines and Guest OS.
Some limitations of this management pack are:
- Bill based costing is not supported.
- Configuration maximums are not supported, it uses the VMC on AWS cloud specific configuration maximums which could be different from the VMC on AWS Outposts.
- Compliance checks for VMware management objects such as hosts, vCenter, etc. are not available.
- Workload optimization including DRS and host-based business intent also do not work.
- Workload optimization for the cross-cluster placement within the SDCC with the cluster-based business intent is fully supported with VMware Aria Operations Cloud, however workload optimization is not aware of resource pools and places the virtual machines at the cluster level, which can be corrected manually in the vCenter.
- Credential-less service discovery is not supported in VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts.
- You cannot login to VMware Aria Operations using your vCenter VMware Cloud vCenter credentials.
- Uses the same configuration for VMware Cloud on AWS and VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts.
While this feature was built with a specific customer in mind, it is generally available for all, however it is not tested for all combinations of AWS outposts with VMC on AWS with VMware Aria Operations on-prem and VMware Aria Operations cloud specifically around the costing features. Do give this management pack a try for the AWS Outposts monitoring report any suggestions and improvements based on your usage and provide feedback via official channels if any …! You can also learn more about other VMware Aria Operations features on TechZone !
