Are you looking at the Software-Defined Datacenter (SDDC) and taking a dive into the vCloud Suite? As you take your journey it sometimes becomes confusing and potentially overwhelming as you look at all the possibilities and figure out what comes next.
For example, it’s fairly easy to recognize the value in these solutions, but you also do understand that implementing change takes time and resources no matter how much you desire to get them done.
Let’s start with vSphere® with Operations Management™ (VSOM). You may or may not know this is a packaged solution of vCenter Operations Manager with vSphere. The edition you purchase changes the edition of vSphere you receive. What does this package do for you?
Well, you’ve already taken the walk down the wonderful road of virtualization, which may have started out simply with consolidation. During the process, you realized the additional benefits that virtualization can bring you and the doors opened up and you started to drool when thinking about all the additional benefits and features you can add on (starting with, but far beyond the mobility, flexibility, etc). Of course, virtualizing also opened up your schedule to accomplish much more than you thought possible during your day at the office. It either opened up the possibility to research and dive into more projects, or allowed you to add more virtual machines than you thought one person could even manage successfully.
The virtual environment grows and more and more people and departments are now involved, but you are still left figuring it all out and staying in front of the moving train without ever slowing down.
A huge advantage of vSphere with Operations Management, right out of the box, is the real time monitoring and alerting of your virtual infrastructure. Even without adding anything or making any tweaks, you’ll start to see typical behaviors and abnormalities that are occurring in your environment. With this newly accessible information, you can start to turn your time into being proactive instead of reactive. The health badges will give you an idea of where to start looking, and you can assess things to change before your support phones start ringing. While you’re clicking through these major and minor badges, you’ll see how the solution relates the objects and helps you to narrow down exactly what you want and need to focus on.
Once you have that stuff under control, spend a little time looking into the risk badge and underlying minor badges. In summary, the risk badge will give you a heads up as to when you are going to run out of resources based on how you’d like to receive this information. For example, if you want to know how many days are left before your vSphere hosts are at capacity, it will show you. Additionally, you can also drill into how many virtual machines, based on your environmental averages, can be deployed before you are out of capacity of your resources.
Third, the efficiency badge let’s you know how efficient your virtual machines are running. In many cases during server consolidation, it’s often “simpler” (maybe faster, easier, less risky) to create virtual machines with resources equivalent to the physical resources once used by the same workload. This leads to inefficiencies and waste, and VSOM will let you know where you can recoup that waste. It will monitor your workloads and suggest which virtual machines are under utilized; having too many resources allocated to them (ie. “Reclaimable Waste”).
In closing, this is just one path you can take along your journey into the Software-Defined Datacenter. In time, we’ll discuss the other many options and paths that will help you grow your environment into the SDDC that works for your needs and company vision. Hopefully this not only cleared up some confusion you may have been experiencing, but also helped you to decide to take another step along your journey. Next, I’ll help you understand the more advanced options of the vCenter Operations Management Suite, and what you can add to truly get a better understanding of your virtual (and physical) environment.
Come back soon!
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