As customers deploy vSAN on a larger scale, they have asked for native HCI and vSAN support in their existing enterprise grade management solutions. They want unified management that provides rapid health and capacity checks, intelligent troubleshooting, and a holistic view of their software-defined data center—including local and remote resources.
We are excited that the just-announced vRealize Operations 6.6 (complete announcement here) introduces native vSAN integration—one-click vSAN monitoring with no separate management pack to install. It also delivers multi-cluster management, predictive analytics for performance and capacity, rapid troubleshooting, and simple monitoring that makes vRealize Operations a popular option for large scale datacenters. This enables customers to proactively monitor infrastructure health, quickly resolve issues, increase application uptime and lower the risk of business disruptions. Ultimately this will lower their costs and enable them to shift their resources to strategic initiatives.
Management at Scale with New vRealize Operations 6.6
vRealize Operations 6.6 is now based on HTML5, which allows vSAN customers to have a similar and consistent user experience as vCenter. Customer can achieve higher efficiencies by using advanced vSAN troubleshooting, proactive alerting, and multi-cluster management in vRealize Operations 6.6. CapEx and OpEx management can be more predictable using the enhanced vSAN capacity management capabilities.
Let’s take a quick look at some of the new highlights for simplified vSAN management in vRealize Operations 6.6.
Advanced vSAN Management Natively Integrated
Additional installation and configuration steps are now eliminated with native vSAN integration in vRealize Operations. Native vSAN support enables one-click vSAN monitoring so customers do not need to install any extra packages—no more separate management pack required.
Customers have asked for a holistic dashboard to provide easy, quick health checks of the entire SDDC. They can now quickly identify any parts of the infrastructure that may require additional attention right away. This is possible using the overall SDDC health dashboard that includes vSAN and provides end-end visibility into infrastructure.
Multi-Cluster and Stretched Clusters Management
As customers deploy vSAN across multiple clusters they’d like a centralized tool with global visibility and simple dashboards for advanced troubleshooting and end-to-end visibility.
To simplify the operations of large vSAN deployments vRealize Operations 6.6 provides centralized management of both multi-site and stretched clusters. This capability extends advanced troubleshooting, proactive alerting, and end-to-end visibility from VM to disk across all of your vSAN environments from one, easy tool. A central overview dashboard shows the total inventory including disks, capacity, and critical issues at an aggregate and per vSAN cluster.
Health and Performance Monitoring with Proactive Alerting
To further increase uptime, customers want to be notified of infrastructure issues on the device of their choice, quickly filter and identify the key issues, and troubleshoot them right away to avoid any risk to the business.
Health and performance monitoring are even easier with the new integrated persona-based dashboards, including dashboards for capacity utilization and reclamation, performance troubleshooting, configuration and compliance, and operations overview. 
New smart context-aware alert management and grouping provides the ability to search and quickly filter out vSAN alerts by cluster. This includes refreshed health checks for the updated Degraded Device Handling in vSAN 6.6 (DDHv2), resync traffic impacting VM performance, firmware updates, disk level checks, and deduplication/compression levels. In addition, new topology views can help quickly identify if a VM is experiencing performance issues due to a vSAN cluster problem or an issue in another part of the infrastructure.
Webhooks are available to send alerts to a ticket or chat room so that you always have up-to-date status of the clusters regardless of your location.
vSAN Capacity Monitoring
One of the most critical, but not always easy jobs of any infrastructure administrator is to ensure there is available capacity for the ever-growing set of customer and business data. As a result, being able to rapidly monitor capacity levels and predict future growth based on capacity trends and space efficiency ratios can greatly simplify that critical job.
To accelerate capacity monitoring and planning, vRealize Operations 6.6 introduces the vSAN Capacity Overview dashboard, which collects and displays aggregate and per cluster capacity totals, used capacity, free capacity, deduplication/compression ratios and reclaimable space capacity. In addition, admins can confidently plan for the future by seeing historical capacity trends and time remaining until available-space-consumed.
Additional dashboards present key information to help predictably plan for upcoming CapEx and OpEx costs by quickly illustrating historical trends, current consumption, predictive analytics and dedupe/compression impact.
You can monitor disk usage (available and used capacity) on disks across all hosts in a cluster, perform capacity planning based on “what if scenarios,” and plan for future hardware purchase based on historic demand and stress trends of vSAN workloads.
Get Started Today
To learn more about managing vSAN at scale using vRealize Operations, check out the latest demos and technical information at:
(Special thanks to Michael Haag, Pooja Virkud, and Anita Kibunguchy for their contribution to this blog)
