vRealize Operation Manager Installation Pending on install.sh

If your company implemented firewall and blocked public NTP server, you may see installation of vRealize Operation Manager pending on ./install.sh on console. That’s because the installer tries to negotiate with NTP server www.iana.org. The firewall blocked the traffic.

VMware TAM Manager Shan told me  there are two options on firewall to block traffic: REJECT and DROP. REJECT means firewall responding to the request and let source device knows it’s rejected. DROP means firewall immediately ignores the request and no responding to source device. Looks like there is a bug in vROPs code that it hung if NTP request gets drop and no responding.

The workaround is create a port group without physical uplinks and install vRealize Operation  Manager. Then move it to proper network after installation  is completed. You can configure correct IP addresses when import the OVF file so later on you just need simply move the network.

在vROps中报表n天以前创建的快照

有很多种方法可以用来做虚拟机快照报表。比如PowerCLI、VRTools、甚至vSphere Client本身也可以。今天我会分享如何使用vRealize Operations Manager (vROps) 6.x做自定义天数以前创建的虚拟机快照的报表。用vROps做表表的好处是可以通过计划任务自动以邮件形式发送报表,并提供PDF和CSV两种格式的表。 我在网上找到了一篇文章谈到如何用vROps实现类似报表。但要求修改vROps的规则,这可能会影响到vROps的全局计算模型。如果你的团队们需要为各自的报表设置不同的条件怎么办?

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Report snapshots older than X days in vROps

There are several ways to reporting snapshots. You can use PowerCLI, VRTools, or even vSphere Client itself. Today I will show you how to reporting by vRealize Operations Manager (vROps) 6.x. The benefit of  vROps reports is you can schedule it by sending email with PDF & CSV reports. I found a post discuss how to reports by vROps. But it requests modify policy, it may impacts global calculation. What if your teams request different criteria for reports?

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vRealize Operations Management Pack for Cisco UCS Review

Cisco UCS blade system is the best blade system I used so far. Whatever the hardware, software or support is perfect. I recommend leverage the system for primary system of virtualization. UCS blade system architecture is different with HP. I feel it more likes a network system. Fabric Interconnect (FI) modules exchange data between uplinks and internal components. IOMs on each chassis controls data routing. Architecture is complicate, but it’s powerful to manage large datacenter. Talking about large datacenter, you may have hundred chassis or blades. Data goes through FIs, IOMs and blades, you could see issues on any layer. It’s hard to find out where exactly the problem is. UCS Manager provides statistics for ports just like how Cisco does on network switches. You can show statistics of a particular port. But it doesn’t tell you when and which layer it happened. I tested Cisco UCS adapter for vRealize Operation Manager before I reviewed NetApp adapter for vRealize Operation Manager. It’s developed by same company Blue Medora. I’d like to introduce few of this product, it’s just my personal review.

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vRealize Operations Manager 6之Cisco UCS性能监控组件介绍

思科UCS刀片系列是我至今用过最好的刀片系统。无论是硬件、软件还是技术支持都堪称完美。个人推荐在大型虚拟化机房里把思科UCS作为主要设备。思科UCS刀片系统的架构和惠普的完全不同,感觉更像是个网络设备。Fabric Interconnect (FI)模块负责上联口和内部各组件之间的数据交换、IOM负责各刀箱数据路由。架构看起来很复杂,但是在管理大型数据中心时非常强大。说到大型数据中心,比如有 上百个刀箱和刀片服务器,数据要经过FI、IOM、刀片等,问题可能发生在任何层面,大型虚拟化数据中心很难找到问题的根源。UCS Manager有提供类似思科网络交换机一样的计数器功能,可以显示每一个端口的计数情况,但是这个监控工具不会告诉你什么时间、在哪个层面发生了问题 。在测试NetApp存储性能监控组件之前我有幸测试了vRealize Operations Manager 6的Cisco UCS性能监控组件。该组建同样由Blue Medora开发。以下简单介绍一下,只是我的个人观点 。

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vRealize Opertion Manager 6之NetApp存储性能监控组件介绍

vRealize Operation Manager 6 (又叫vROps)是vCenter Operation Manager的全新版本,我从vCenter Operation Manager还是1.0时就开始使用了,很喜欢自我学习和动态阀值这两个功能。但是这款产品只能监控虚拟层面,如果可以监控存储层面就完美了。在比较大的vSphere环境中虚拟机是共享ESXi数据存储(datastore)的,如果少数虚拟机产生很高的IO,可能会影响到其他处于同一个存储上的虚拟机。想象一下,如果你有100个LUN跑在一个NetApp存储上,300个虚拟机在使用这100个LUN,某日用户说他们的虚拟机很慢,但是他们并没有跑什么应用,这时候就会比较难判断到底是哪儿出了问题,因为虚拟机可能共享同一个数据存储(datastore),数据存储存建于LUN上,LUN 可能来自某个聚合(Aggregate),并且多个LUN可能来自同一个物理磁盘。vCenter Operation Manager 在5.x时代有提供一款NetApp存储监控组件,但问题是很难把vSphere的数据存储(Datastore)和NetApp存储的设备关联起来。

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NetApp Management Package for vRealize Operation Manager 6

vRealize Operation Manager 6 (aka vROps) is new generation of vCenter Operation Manager. I started to use vCenter Operation Manager since version 1.0. I like the idea of self-learning and dynamic threshold. But the product only monitors virtualization layer. It would be perfect if it’s able to monitor under layer storage. In large vSphere environment, virtual machines share IO capacity of datastores. If few virtual machines running high disk IO it may lead to other virtual machines get performance degrading in same storage. Think about you have 100 datastores come from a NetApp filer, and 300 virtual machines running on its. One user says their virtual machine is slow but no workload from applications end. It hard to say where the latency comes from because multiple virtual machines may share same datastore, multiple LUNs share same aggregate, and maybe same physical disks. vCenter Operation Manager provided NetApp Adapter for 5.x few years ago. But the problem was it’s too hard to associate storage objects with vSphere datastore objects.

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