What is vROPS?
vRealize Operations Manager comes as a virtual appliance that is to be deployed in your management cluster if you have one. It can be installed in a number of ways, tailored to your environment’s size and complexity. The easiest scenario consists of embedding all the components in a single virtual appliance, while more complex architectures will require that you deploy the components independently running as separate VMs which opens the door to HA implementations and larger collection sets.
vRealize Operations Manager collects data from the environment and processes it to make recommendations, identify issues, trigger policy-based automation as well as a whole lot of analytical goodness to improve operations’ efficiency.
vROPS also offers a pluggable architecture to extend the monitoring to third-party products through what are called management packs. More on that later.
My Top 10 vROPS Features
My top 10 will probably differ from yours as each environment has its quirks and specifics. So, let’s say we will cover 10 features of vRealize Operations Manager that we deemed worthy of making this list.
Policy Creation and Management
Policies are applied to objects or groups and let you configure which metrics and properties are gathered, which alerts and symptoms are enabled, capacity and compliance settings as well as workload automation.
A default policy is created when you connect an endpoint, from which you can create inherited policies. You then get to tailor each policy to the population of objects it will be applied to.
For instance, you may want to apply rather aggressive thresholds to your dev and test workloads as you don’t really care if it gets toasty there. However, production VMs will get more conservative settings to ensure as best an SLA as possible.
You may also want to ensure the environment associated with a specific customer is compliant with whatever industry-standard they must comply with by contract such as ISO, PCI, HIPAA…
You also use policies to control what data vROPS will collect and report on for specific objects to avoid wasting storage, bandwidth and compute on useless data.
Note that a fair number of default policies are already baked in vRealize Operations Manager when deploying the appliance. Those policies were designed by VMware to fit most environments and offer a good level of visibility to get started without a great level of knowledge of the product.
By creating inherited policies, you can change the state of inherited symptoms and alerts or even disable them on a subset of objects.
vROPS Workload Optimization
If you work with VMware products, chances are you rely heavily on vSphere s/DRS (storage/ Distributed Resources Scheduler) to make sure the demand of your virtual machines is met. While it may appear like so, DRS is not a load balancing feature. Its goal isn’t to have all hosts at the same resource utilization level, its objective is to ensure that the virtual machines have enough resources to run. For instance, if one host is running at 50% with 30 VMs while others are cruising at 5%, DRS won’t make a move if the VMs are fine.
You can get closer to achieve actual load balancing with vRealize Operations Manager thanks to a feature called vROPS Workload Optimization. It works in concert with vSphere DRS to optimize the VM placement in your environment according to a threshold.
Comparably to DRS, you get to set a threshold that will either balance the workloads across all hosts or consolidate them on as few as possible to reduce the licensing or electric bills for instance. Where it gets interesting here is that you can set a cluster headroom value to implement a resources buffer and account for demand spikes.
On top of that, Workload Optimization works with tags to let you enforce VM placements on hosts or clusters with the “Business Intent” pane. For instance, all VMs with the tag “MSFT” are placed on the cluster assigned with the same “MSFT” tag. This will come in handy for various purposes such as licensing, geographical locations, hardware types… Consequently, it does mean that vRealize Operations will automatically create and manage DRS rules. As a result, all conflicting user-created DRS rules will be disabled.
Note that you can obviously choose to run it manually with the “Optimize Now” button or automatically either following a schedule or in real-time when an alert pops up. You can go even further and tie it with predictive DRS to get a tight resource management automation system.
Note that all the clusters in the datacenter must be configured with DRS in fully automated mode.
Management packs
You can extend vROPS’ monitoring capabilities to other VMware products or third-party products thanks to “Management Packs”. Those are like plug-ins you install in vRealize Operations Manager that open an interface to new endpoints. There is a number of packs already installed in vROPS, some of them are deactivated by default such as standards compliances, ping, and service monitoring.
Once you’ve downloaded a management pack you get a *.pak file that you need to upload to the vROPS appliance in Administration > Solutions > Repository.
According to how the plugin is made, new resources will be made available to manage this environment such as dashboards, views, symptoms, alerts… In the example below, you can see all the new dashboards brought by a DellEMC management pack I installed.
Cloud providers integration
Most companies nowadays have integrated cloud services in their infrastructure to some degree. Whether you leverage SaaS workloads or pay for IaaS capacity such as VMware Cloud on AWS, chances are you will want to monitor whatever you are running in there.
vRealize Operations offers management packs for the biggest cloud providers:
Google Cloud Platform
Microsoft Azure
Amazon Web Services
VMware Cloud on AWS
These are incredibly easy to set up. For instance, in order to monitor AWS services, simply go to IAM in the management console and create a user with Programmatic access which will provide you with an access key ID and secret access key pair. You will then use this pair to connect your AWS account in vROPS. You should start seeing data coming in after a few minutes of collection.
The screenshot above depicts a t2-micro EC2 instance (free-tier) that I run in AWS. As you can see, similarly to your on-premise components, you get the relationship between the objects (subnet, Nic, EBS volume…) as well as usage metrics such as CPU, RAM, disk, network…
Rightsizing recommendations
IT pros that aren’t well versed in virtualization usually benefit a great deal from running vROPS in their environment for a few weeks and analyzing the result with a consultant. They are often surprised by the outcome as it may sometimes seem counter-intuitive. A common recommendation made by vROPS is to downsize virtual machines, not only to save capacity but also to improve overall performances. However, you also get valuable recommendations on how to efficiently scale up your workloads.
Undersized VMs
While you may figure out by yourself that a bunch of VMs are running hot and struggling to keep up with the demand, it will not always be that obvious to know whether you should actually add resources based on trends, spikes, maintenances, etc… and how much.
vROPS will help you with that as it will tell you which VMs would benefit from an increase, and more importantly how much to add. There is no point in throwing 20GB of RAM at the VM if it’s not likely to use more than 10GB.
Oversized VMs
Virtual Machines sizing is often done on a generic basis from a template and the VMs are scaled up when the demand increases. However, more often than not, people will bump a VM from 2 vCPU to 8 “because it’ll run better” when it would only need 4.
Put it this way, how tricky would it be to get 8 seats next to each other on a Saturday night at the movies when there’s plenty of 2 or 4 groups of empty seats? The problem is the same with oversizing VMs’ CPUs. It can actually harm its performances as the host’s vmkernel will have a hard time scheduling it on the physical cores of the CPU(s) while smaller VMs will easily get a free spot.
Resize Actions
On top of making recommendations, vROPS also offers the possibility to resize the virtual machines for you. It can be triggered instantly or scheduled to run at a later time. It will initiate a guest OS shutdown using the VMware Tools, reconfigure the VM’s hardware, and power it back on.
Automation and Actions
vRealize Operations is primarily a monitoring and capacity tool indeed, however, you can very well automate tasks initiated from within vROPS so you don’t have to switch between management consoles.
Actions
You can execute actions on most objects in the inventory. The available set will obviously change according to the object type. Below are actions for a cluster and a virtual machine.
Execute a script
Note the “Execute Script” choice in the section above. This will execute a script inside the guest OS like you would do in PowerCLI in this way. If you click Execute Script, you have top type valid OS credentials and you will then get the choice to type commands manually or upload a script to run.
Automation central
This feature available in the “Home” pane lets you automate tasks on a schedule and display them in an easy-to-use calendar. It works by selecting an action, a scope, and a schedule. A limited set of actions are available for now but it covers the most common operational tasks.
Remediation
On top of what we’ve seen so far, you can also run actions based on triggered alerts. A fair number of actions are built-in vROPS. Note that if you want to build on this feature to achieve a greater level of automation, you can leverage vRealize Orchestrator to create custom recommendations thanks to the vRealize Orchestrator Management Pack. You will need to download it on the VMware marketplace, upload it to the appliance and configure an account to connect to it.
Once this is done you can configure vRealize Orchestrator workflows as remediation to a vROPS alert. This can be valuable if your workflows are tightly integrated with your IT organization such as a ticketing system.
Compliance enforcement
Ensuring environments are compliant with such and such policy is a critical part of an IT department. There are various industry standards and making sure all the requirements are applied is far from straightforward and can be time-consuming.
Implementing the recommendations may actually be the easy part here, what makes it tricky is to ensure that it stays that way. Environments and configurations tend to drift from their original baseline as time goes by and operations get in the way.
vROPS offers incredible value in compliance enforcement through the use of dashboards, views, symptoms, alerts that you get from industry standards compliance management packs that aren’t embedded or activated out of the box.
Trending and Capacity planning
One of the pain points of any infrastructure is to account for future growth, also called capacity planning. Although it’s also true for cloud workloads to some degree, it mostly applies to on-premise SDDC as you can’t scale the capacity as flexibly as in the cloud.
vRealize Operations will help you in that aspect by analyzing trends of resource consumption in your environments and make predictions as to where it is going. It will obviously need at least several months’ worth of data to produce somewhat reliable recommendations.
Capacity planning will be most accurate in environments where the overall resources usage is somewhat steady (spikes excluded). As in, if your resource consumption is completely random and goes up and down all over the place, vROPS won’t do a good job at planning future growth. Such patterns may make it worth it to look into moving workloads to the cloud if possible as it may save you some cash.
On the Homepage, you get an overview of the capacity in each data center that will display the time remaining until a resource runs out and recommendations on how to avoid getting there.
Note that there are several What-if scenarios you can run, not only adding VMs:
Workload Planning: Traditional
Workload Planning: Hyperconverged and VMC on AWS
Infrastructure Planning: Traditional
Infrastructure Planning: Hyperconverged
Migration Planning: VMware Cloud
Migration Planning: Public Cloud
Datacenter Comparison: Private Cloud
Application monitoring
While vRealize Operations is the best tool to monitor VMware environments, it is also a great contender when it comes to application monitoring. Historic software products such as Nagios and Zabbix are very powerful in that regard but vROPS holds its ground as it can offer clear visualization of your application fluxes if you put in the time and effort to set it up.
Right away you can start by using the Service Discovery feature that works by querying VMware Tools to identify a set of supported services. You can then enable their monitoring of the objects themselves. While this is a great start, you can achieve better in-depth visibility with Application monitoring.
The feature leverages the Telegraf agent for Windows Server, Linux (rpm), AIX, Solaris, Oracle Linux, and Photon. It can be installed on virtual or physical machines. It supports a number of applications out of the box and is equipped with sets of metrics that you can expand with custom script monitoring.
As you can tell, vRealize Operations Manager is a very powerful product built on VMware’s experience acquired over the years since the first release of vCenter Operations Manager back in 2013. Although this blog was pretty lengthy, we barely scratched the surface of what vROPS can do and how it can help any organization get more proactive and achieve a better SLA.
If you are interested in giving vRealize Operations a shot, keep in mind that it is available in 3 license levels that will give you access to more or fewer features.
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