Hopefully, you’ve read the first two articles in this series: Part 1 and Part 2. We will continue the series in this article with some coverage of how vRealize Operations Manager expands on the capacity management functionality in vSAN and vSphere.
Dashboards in the vSphere Client
The latest versions of vSphere, vSAN, and vRealize Operations Manager make it very easy to deploy vRealize Operations and view dashboards directly in the vSphere Client—no need to switch tools and learn a new UI. These integrated dashboards are included with vSAN Advanced and higher licensing editions. The process of deploying vRealize Operations from the vSphere Client is also easy. This 30-second video shows a quick overview of the process…
Once the vRealize Operations virtual appliance is deployed and some time has passed to process data, dashboards will be populated with information. One of the first items you see is “Are there any issues?” Next to that, “Am I running out of Capacity?” A drop-down menu makes it easy to switch between three types of resources. One of those resource selections is, of course, storage. A simple color scheme provides the current status at a glance. Here we see green—sufficient capacity remains.
Selecting vSAN > Cluster Overview from the Quick Links menu provides key metrics such as alerts, performance statistics (IOPS, throughput, etc.), and capacity information. If more details are needed, it is one click to open the full vRealize Operations Manager UI.
Prebuilt vSAN Dashboards in vRealize Operations Manager
Prebuilt vSAN dashboards are included with the latest version of vRealize Operations Advanced and higher editions. We can see that multiple clusters are displayed on the capacity dashboard to provide a more holistic view of the environment. This dashboard features multiple widgets such as cluster utilization, capacity remaining, and deduplication and compression efficiency. vRealize Operations shows raw capacity utilization with deduplication and compression enabled and disabled. This takes the guesswork out of determining how much raw capacity is needed if the deduplication and compression setting is changed for the cluster.
Realize Operations also provides a basic forecast for when the current raw capacity will be exhausted, a list of idle virtual machines, and a list of powered off virtual machines. These charts highlight potential opportunities to reclaim capacity and when more capacity will need to be added to the cluster.
Conclusion
Administrators prefer and need varying levels of capacity data when supporting an HCI environment. The vSphere Client shows information such as current utilization and historical trends. vRealize Operations can be deployed, which provides overview dashboards integrated into the vSphere Client for simplicity and ease of use. These integrated dashboards are included with a vSAN Advanced or higher edition license. A fully licensed instance of vRealize Operations Manager Advanced or higher provides even more information and enables administrators to monitor and manage multiple clusters within a single UI. More details are provided with vRealize Operations such as cluster utilization trends, vSAN deduplication and compression statistics (enabled and disabled), capacity forecasting, and potential opportunities to reclaim capacity that is underutilized or unused. The integration of vSphere, vSAN, and vRealize Operations enable a powerful toolset for monitoring and managing HCI clusters.
To learn more about vRealize Operations with vSAN, take a look at these items:
White Paper: vRealize Operations and Log Insight in vSAN Environments
Click-through Demo: vSAN vRealize Operations Dashboards
vSAN Capacity Management and Monitoring Part 1
