By Choong Keng Leong
I innocently asked attendees in a workshop I was delivering at one of my clients, “Who uses VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite in your company?“ I got two simple answers: “Cloud administrator” or “VM administrator.” This triggered me to write this blog and hopefully will change your thinking if you have the same answer.
The vCenter Operations Management Suite consists of four components:
- vCenter Operations Manager : Allows you to monitor and manage the performance, capacity and health of your SDDC infrastructure, operating systems and applications
- vCenter Configuration Manager : Enables you to automate configuration management across virtual and physical servers, and continuously assess them for compliance with IT policies, regulatory, and security compliance
- vCenter Hyperic : Helps to monitor operating systems, databases, and applications
- vCenter Infrastructure Navigator : Automatically discovers and visualizes application components and infrastructure dependencies
If I were to map the vCenter Operations Management Suite to the IT processes it can support, it would look like the matrix shown in Table 1:
What Table 1 also implies is that multiple roles will be using and accessing vCenter Operations Manager, or be a recipient of its outputs, i.e., reports. For example, the IT Director can access the vCenter Operations Manager Dashboard to view the overall health of the infrastructure. The Application Support team accesses it via a Custom Dashboard to understand applications status and performance. The IT Compliance Manager reviews the compliance status of IT systems on the vCenter Operations Manager Dashboard and gets more details from the vCenter Configuration Manager to initiate remediation of the systems.
Table 2 below shows a possible list of roles accessing the vCenter Operations Management Suite.
Tables 1 and 2 illustrate clearly that vCenter Operations Management Suite is not just another lightweight app for the cloud or VM administrator — it supports multiple IT operational processes and roles.
Taking a step further, you need to embed vCenter Operations Management Suite into operational procedures to take maximum advantage of the tools’ full potential and integrated approach to performance, capacity, and configuration management. To draw an analogy – if you deploy a new SAP system without defining the triggers or use cases for a user to access the SAP system; establishing the procedural steps on which modules to access and how to navigate in the system; what to input; how to query and report and so on; it is unlikely the system will be rolled out successfully.
Although vCenter Operations Management Suite is not as complex, the concept is the same. You need to define procedures with tight linkage to the tools to ensure they are used consistently and in the way it is designed or configured for.
I hope that my blog motivates you to start thinking about transforming your IT operations to make full use of the capabilities of your VMware technology investment.
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Choong Keng Leong is an operations architect with VMware Professional Services and is based in Singapore. You can connect with him on LinkedIn
