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راه اندازی VMware vCenter Operation Manager

فوریه 5, 2016
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راه اندازی VMware vCenter Operation Manager

This article looks into what VMware vCenter Operations Manager offers, the flavors it comes in, and why you need it.

If you would like to read the other parts in this article series please go to:

Introduction

Up until recently VMware typically recommend that you need additional tools, above and beyond VMware vCenter, for performance and capacity but more and more third-party solutions have popped up over the years. Still, some type of tool has been necessary for most enterprises because vCenter, in itself, just doesn’t make capacity monitoring and performance troubleshooting easy. In 2010, VMware bought Integrien with their Alive product, retooled it, and launched it in 2011 as VMware vCenter Operations Manager. Let’s find out what it offers, the flavors it comes in, and why you need it in this first article in my three part series on vCenter Operations (vCOPS).

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Overview of vCenter Operations Manager

Commonly called vCOPS, vCenter Operations Manger comes in 4 different flavors, each with more and more features. No matter which edition you have, the goal of all of them is to provide performance, capacity, and configuration management for your VMware vSphere infrastructure.


Figure 1: vCenter Operations Manager Correlating Performance with vCenter Events

Here are the four different editions and what each offers:

  • Standard – offering performance, alerts, self-learning performance analytics, dynamic thresholds, capacity metering, and event correlation with vSphere
  • Advanced – offering performance and capacity for larger vSphere environments including everything that standard offered plus trending dashboards, scenarios and modeling, and capacity alerting with reporting
  • Enterprise – including everything that advanced offered plus vCenter infrastructure navigator, chargeback, and vCenter chargeback (for vSphere hosts only). Additionally, enterprise offers customizable dashboards, extensibility to third-party data sources, compliance, application dependency mapping, application relationship visualization, cost metering and analysis.
  • Enterprise Plus – the highest edition of vCOPS includes everything from lower editions third-party adaptor support and additional configuration and compliance features.

And, recently, a new edition was launched, VMware vCenter Operations Manager for View. This new version is tailored toward the performance and capacity analysis of VMware View virtual desktop infrastructures. While I haven’t had the chance to use this new version yet, from the feature list and the screenshots, I really do like how it monitors statistics like:

  • VDI health
  • Connected sessions
  • Session latency
  • Session login time
  • PCOIP TX/RX bandwidth
  • VDI capacity used


Figure 2: VMware vCenter Operations Manager for View

With so many capacity and performance tools for vSphere available, why should enterprises consider vCOPS? Let’s find out.

Six Reasons that vCenter Operations Manager is Unique

All capacity tools for vSphere are going to monitor CPU, memory, storage, and network utilization. You’ll want to know that information about the infrastructure both real-time and historically so that you can solve both current issues as well as be able to analyze the historical trend. Of course, all vSphere performance tools need to be able to talk with vCenter to pull back statistics that only vCenter and ESXi hosts can capture. Traditional capacity analysis tools that use SNMP or Microsoft WMI just aren’t going to cut it to analyze vSphere virtual infrastructures. You must have tools that, minimally, talk to vCenter and, perhaps, have other methods of gathering data.

Here are six reasons vCenter Operations Manager is unique:

  1. It’s from VMware – it’s the only performance and capacity tool from VMware, supported by VMware, and just for vSphere. You can buy vCOPS with vSphere (not saying that you’ll get a reduction in cost but they are from the same source). Perhaps using vCOPS with vSphere will give you better performance data but I have not heard any claim from VMware about that nor have I seen it myself. Still, there is something to say for buying your performance & capacity tool from the software developer of your hypervisor.
  2. Health/Risk/Efficiency badge scores – vCOPs actually learns about your virtual infrastructure over time and gives you distinct “badges scores” about it the infrastructure overall, the hosts, the virtual machines, and other objects. They range from 0-100. I’ll have more on these scores, below.
  3. Configuration management – included in the enterprise edition of vCOPS is VMware’s configuration management tool. This tool was purchased from EMC as ConfigureSoft and was renamed VMware Configuration Management (found in vCOPS enterprise). Config management includes configuration data collection, configuration change execution, configuration reporting, change auditing, compliance assessment, patch management, OS provisioning and software package distribution.
  4. Application dependency mapping (or ADM) – dubbed vCenter Infrastructure Navigator (VIN), this separate virtual appliance was acquired from EMC Ionix as Application Discovery Manager (formerly nLayers). Its purpose is to map the tier-1 applications running inside your virtual machines to their critical tiers, running in other virtual machines. For example, ADM would show a web server connected to two different databases. It can even integrate with VMware’s Site Recovery Manager (SRM) to ensure that all the virtual machines that make up the application are properly connected.
  5. Compliance checking – with knowledge of configuration and knowledge of vSphere security and configuration policies, vCOPS can continually check vSphere host and VM configurations to ensure that the configurations haven’t deviated from required policies. This way, enterprises can ensure that their virtual infrastructure is continually in compliance with regulations affecting them.
  6. Correlation of vCenter Data – not only does vCOPS monitor performance and capacity but it also pulls vCenter events and then correlates all of it together. This is very useful because most performance events are connected to vSphere events, in some way. Most performance tools don’t correlate virtual infrastructure performance and events so this is a welcome feature.

Understanding Badge Scoring

As I mentioned above, one of the things that makes vCOPS unique is its use of, what they call, “badge scoring”. vCenter Operations Manager examines internally generated metrics and uses its proprietary analytics formulas to determine an overall badge rating for a resource – such as a host or VM. The badge rating, which ranges from 0 to 100, gives you a quick status of every resource in the virtual infrastructure. The badge ratings appear both as numeric indicators as well as color coded badges, indicating what resources are in a troubled state.


Figure 3: Health Index Scores

As you see in the graphic above, the three common index scores provided by vCOPS. Here are all the index scores it provides:

  • Health – combines workload, anomalies, and faults to assess the overall health and to determine whether the workload level is expected in that environment. A low health score might indicate a potential problem. The overall health score for an object ranges from 0 (bad) to 100 (good). Sub-badges under health include workload, anomalies, and faults.
  • Workload – measures how hard an object must work for resources. A workload score of 0 indicates that a resource is not being used and a score that approaches or exceeds 100 might cause performance problems. Workload is an absolute measurement that calculates the demand for a resource divided by the capacity of an object. Resources might include CPU, memory, disk I/O, or network I/O. The Workload score ranges from 0 (good) to over 100 (bad).
  • Anomalies – measures the extent of abnormal behavior for an object based on historical metrics data. A high number of anomalies might indicate a potential issue. A low Anomalies score indicates that an object is behaving in accordance with its established historical parameters.
  • Faults – measure the degree of problems that the object might experience based on events retrieved from the vCenter Server. The events that might generate faults include the loss of redundancy in NICs or HBAs, memory checksum errors, high availability failover, or Common Information Model (CIM) events, which require your immediate attention.
  • Capacity Risk – indicates a potential performance problem in the near future that might affect the virtual environment. Risk involves the time remaining, capacity remaining, and stress factors that account for the time buffer, remaining virtual machines, and degree of habitual high workload. vCenter Operations Manager calculates the risk score using the scores of the sub-badges that the Risk badge contains. These sub-badges include time remaining, capacity remaining, and stress. The overall Risk score for an object ranges between 0 (no risk) to 100 (serious risk).
  • Efficiency – identifies the potential opportunities to improve the performance or cost of your virtual environment. Efficiency accounts for the waste and infrastructure density in your environment. A large amount of wasted resources combined with a low density ratio generates a poor efficiency score. The Efficiency score ranges between 0 (bad) and 100 (good). Sub-badges under efficiency are reclaimable waste and density.

Each resource is assigned the value for its current health status. Those values are: Good (green), Abnormal (yellow), Degraded (orange), Bad (red), and Unknown (blue).

The use of this health scoring, based on statistical analysis over time, is something that makes vCOPS unique in the capacity and performance monitoring category.

Sold On a Per-VM Basis

Something else that makes vCOPS unique (for good or bad) is that vCOPS is sold on a per-VM basis. Traditional vSphere infrastructure performance and capacity tools are sold on a “per host CPU” basis such that you are licensed for every host in your virtual infrastructure. The good side of “per VM pricing” is that you have a flat, predictable cost for performance monitoring functionality for every VM in your infrastructure. The bad side, in my opinion, is that you are being charged even for the handful of VMs that may make up your vCOPS monitoring. You are also not incentivized to maximize your infrastructure by fitting more VMs per host – something that has always been a core benefit of server virtualization.

For how to install and use vCenter Operations Manager, please read my follow up articles.

This article shows how to download vCops and how to get it deployed, in your virtual infrastructure, in short order.

If you would like to read the other parts in this article series please go to:

Introduction

In my first article of this three part series on VMware vCenter Operations Manager (vCOPS), I discussed what vCOPS does and what makes it unique. In this second article of the series, I’ll show you how to download it and how to get it deployed, in your virtual infrastructure, in no short order.

To get started on the process of installing vCOPS, you first need to download it. Fortunately, VMware offers a 60-day evaluation of both vCOPS and vSphere (along with vCenter). You can download it here.

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Downloading vCenter Operations Manager

I already had vSphere 5 and vCenter 5 deployed in my vSphere lab. To evaluate vCOPS, all I had to do was see the vCOPS product evaluation center to download it and obtain license keys.

 


Figure 1: vCOPS Evaluation Center

Once you register for your free account and login, in the eval center, you’ll find your 60 day evaluation keys for vCOPS, vCenter Infrastructure Navigator, and vCenter Chargeback. You’ll also find downloads for each of those products. Note that if you want to evaluate vCenter Configuration Manager, you’ll have to click to contact a sales rep.

 


Figure 2: Downloading the Evaluation of vCenter Operations Manager

Both vCOPS and vIN are distributed as OVA virtual appliances that require no install. vCenter Chargeback is a Windows installation distributed as a ZIP file.

As I just wanted to eval vCOPS at this time, I downloaded the OVA file for it and noted the license key.

Deploying the vCOPS Virtual Appliance

From here, I needed to deploy vCOPS into my vSphere infrastructure. As it is an OVA virtual appliance, that’s easy. I went into my vSphere client and, under File, I clicked on Deploy OVF Template. Yes, we downloaded an OVA and we chose to import and OVF but, no worries, importing an OVA will work just fine.

Next, I went through the standard virtual appliance deployment process with a few difference, of note below. I started by selecting the OVA download, shown below.

 


Figure 3: Specifying the OVA Download File

vCenter found the file and recognized it, showing me the version, size, and that I am choosing to deploy a vApp with two virtual machines inside. That’s right; we are deploying 2 virtual machines from a single OVA appliance import (a first for me).

 


Figure 4: Deploying vCOPS Virtual Appliance

From here, I accepted the license agreements, specified a name for the virtual appliance, told it my vSphere infrastructure was “small”, put the virtual machines on my shared SAN, opted for thin provisioning as the disk format (as this is a lab environment), took the default network, set IP addressing to DHCP, set the timezone, and chose to power the vApp on after deployment. Here is what my “are you sure” screen looked like:

 


Figure 5: Final Confirmation Before Deploying the vCOPS Appliance

Once I clicked Finish and the deployment started, it took a few minutes and the end result was a new vApp (which I called “vCOPS”) that included two virtual machines – UI VM and Analytics VM.

 


Figure 6: vCOPS Successfully Deployed

Here are a few things I’d like us to take a second to note about these new vCOPS VMs:

  • The vApp can be deployed onto a host or onto a cluster however, if you deploy it onto a cluster that cluster must have DRS enabled. If not, you’ll get a very cryptic error, telling you something misleading.
  • Even though I pre-configured the vApp during deployment for a “small environment”, both of these virtual machines are pre-configured with a ton of resources.
  • The Analytics VM has 2 x vCPUs and 9GB of RAM
  • The UI VM has 2 x vCPUs and 7GB of RAM
  • The VMware tools can’t be installed on either VM (which, for performance, is a shame and I don’t understand)
  • Both VMs are running Novell SUSE Enterprise 11 64bit
  • Static IP addressing and Think virtual disk provisioning are what you must use for a production environment
  • You’ll want to enter DNS host aliases for each of the vCOPS virtual machines that you choose to run which map to the static IP addresses

We are now deployed, what next?

Initial Login to vCenter Operations Manager

Once the vApp is deployed, it isn’t initially obvious what to do next to get “vCOPS working”. If you go to the consoles of the new vCOPS virtual machines, you’ll get an unfriendly-looking Linux-based login prompt and the default username & password of admin/admin won’t work. If you get the IP addresses of the VMs (either the ones that you configured as static or the IP addresses on the summary tab of each VM) and point your web browser to them, you’ll find that only the IP address of the “UI VM” responds to you with a login prompt. Here it is:

 


Figure 7: Logging into vCenter Operations Manager “UI VM” with Default Credentials

Again, because it is worth repeating, to access the vCOPS interface, do the following:

  • Get the IP address from the summary tab of the “UI VM”
  • Point your web browser to it
  • Accept the security risk of the untrusted connection
  • Login with the default credentials of admin for the username and admin for the password

Once you click Login, you’ll see the vCOPS initial setup wizard.

Configuring vCOPS with the Initial Setup Wizard

Initial configuration of the vCenter Operations Manager tools are performed with the vCOPS Initial Setup Wizard that appears when you first login to the web interface. It’s simply wizard-driving, step by step process will allow you to configure vCOPS by answering a handful of questions over a few different windows that you are guided through.

The first screen wants to know the IP address (or hostname) and credentials to your vCenter server as well as the IP address of the vCOPS analytics VM.

 


Figure 8: Configuring vCOPS to Communicate with vCenter

Next, you’ll be promoted to change the web admin password as well as the root password for the Linux console (or SSH login).

 


Figure 9: Changing vCOPS Passwords

Next, you’ll need to provide information about the vCenter server that you want to monitor. Keep in mind that this could be different from the information you provided at the start of this wizard about vCenter as the vCOPS VM may be running on a different vCenter than what it monitors (but usually, they are the same).

 


Figure 10: Specifying a vCenter Server

If you have no plugins and no linked vCenter servers, you can just click Next on the next two screens.

Click Finish to complete the setup. Once completed, you should see a screen that looks like this:

 


Figure 11: vCOPS Setup Completed

As you can see from the graphic, this vCOPS installation is “unlicensed”. We need to do something about that.

Assigning a License Key to vCOPS

To start using vCOPS, once configured, you must assign a license key. This key is going to be the key that you saw in the same VMware web interface where you downloaded vCenter Operations. You’ll want to copy this key into your clipboard, open the vSphere Client, and paste it in a certain place. Here’s how.

Inside your vSphere client, connected to vCenter, go to the Home screen and then to Licensing. It’s here that you’ll click Manage vSphere Licenses and Add your new license key. When you are done, it should look like this:

 


Figure 12: Licensing vCenter Operations Manager

If you don’t see vCenter Operations as an asset then try opening the vSphere client on the vCenter server.

Now, close and reopen your vSphere Client.

Go into the Home screen and under Solutions and Applications, click on vCenter Operations Manager.

 


Figure 13: vCenter Operations Manager Solution in the vSphere Client

After accepting the security certificate, you should be rewarded with the vCOPS Dashboard, shown below.

 


Figure 14: vCOPS Dashboard

For information on using vCenter Operations Manager, see my next article in this series.

 

n this third and final article in the series, I’ll show you how to make best use of this new vSphere infrastructure performance monitoring and capacity analysis tool that you’ve just installed.

If you would like to read the other parts in this article series please go to:

Introduction

In my past two articles in this three part series covering VMware vCenter Operations Manager, I first provided anIntroduction to vCenter Operations Manager and then I showed you how to Install vCenter Operations. In this third and final article in the series, I’ll show you how to make best use of this new vSphere infrastructure performance monitoring and capacity analysis tool that you’ve just installed. As you learned in my first article, vCenter Ops (vCOPS) is offers unique features and functions and has a lot to offer. Let me show you how.

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How vCenter Operations Collects Data

No matter what monitoring and performance tool I look at, one of the first questions I ask is “how does this thing get its data?” I ask this because how a tool gathers its data controls what it can and can’t do for you. If it doesn’t have the data that it needs, it’s unlikely that it can help you. Thus, one of the first things I wanted to explain is how vCenter Ops gathers its data.

Here’s what you need to know about vCenter Ops data collection:

  • vCOPS collects several types of data for a single monitored vSphere resource
  • Each of these types of data collected is called an attribute
  • A metric is an attribute for a specific resource in the virtual infrastructure
  • For each of those metrics, multiple readings are taken over time and each of those readings is a value
  • Certain attributes are identified as being more important than others as they could indicate severe problems in the vSphere infrastructure. Those special groups of attributes are called KPIs, or key performance indicators.
  • A vSphere admin can create “super metrics” that might, for example, track the average free disk space for all Exchange servers in your vSphere infrastructure
  • All of these metrics are collected from your vCenter server’s database and are moved out, into a vCOPS database, running inside the vCOPS Analytics VM
  • Because vCOPS pulls data from the vCOPS database, it can start providing useful performance and capacity information the first day it is installed because it can use the historical data, imported from vCenter

Logging In To vCenter Ops

While I did mention how to access vCOPS in the previous article in this series, I want to make sure I make it clear in this article on using vCOPS. Here’s what you need to know:

  • vCOPS is a web-based application
  • You will always connect to it using the vCOPS “UI VM” IP address or DNS hostname
  • You can access it in two ways – through the vSphere Client or through your web-browser.
  • If you access it through the vSphere Client, you’ll find it under Home -> Solutions and Applications -> vCenter Operations Manager
  • My favorite way to use vCOPS is through the web-based interface (not through the vSphere Client) because of the greater screen real estate that a regular web-browser can give you
  • You’ll need to know your vCOPS web administrator username and password. The default is admin and the default password is admin, as well. However, when you ran the setup wizard, you changed the default password to something that you (hopefully) remember.
  • You can also access the vCOPS Linux-based command line by bringing up the VM console or by SSH’ing to the vCOPS “UI VM” IP address or hostname

Here’s what the web interface login looks like:

 


Figure 1: Logging into the vCOPS UI VM Web Interface

vCenter Ops Dashboards and Widgets

Efficiently using vCOPS is all about taking advantage of dashboards and widgets. What’s that, you ask?

  • Dashboards – depending on your vCOPS privileges, you can create your own dashboards and add, remove, or re-arrange your own widgets. The Dashboard is where you will start using vCOPS. You can think of the Dashboard as the “homepage” of vCOPS and your table of contents to help you to dig deep down into your vSphere infrastructure performance and capacity. Most resources you see on the dashboard are hyperlinks that you can click on to dig down into more details and information about those resources. Each of the badges (critical to know and explained in my first article in this series) are hyperlinks that allow you to find out why your vSphere infrastructure’s health, risk, or efficiency are scored the way that they are scored. The dashboard is all about giving you a quick overview to tell you what if you need to take action NOW to solve a problem in the vSphere infrastructure or if you can go back to sitting by the pool.

 


Figure 2: vCOPS Dashboard Home Screen

  • Widgets – widgets are the small vCOPS “apps” on almost every page of the vCOPS interface which show graphs and calculate things like health, efficiency, time remaining, and reclaimable waste. If you have the right permissions you can configure the widgets, add them, remove them, or rearrange them.

Now, let’s get started monitoring your vSphere infrastructure with vCOPS.

Monitoring vSphere with vCenter Ops “Operations” Tab

Day to day performance monitoring of your vSphere infrastructure is done from the Operations tab. No matter what level of your vSphere infrastructure hierarchy you are at, the Operations tab will have five sub-tabs that break down into Environment, Scoreboard, Details, Events, and All Metrics. While the labels of these different sub-tabs are somewhat intuitive, the one that strikes me as most unique and useful is the Details. Here are the Details for my primary virtual datacenter:

 


Figure 3: Operations Tab Details for My Virtual Data Center

From this details tab, at the high view of my virtual datacenter, I can tell that I am “memory bound” but my health is 96, my workload is 22, and, so far, I have no anomalies or faults. By clicking on the workload badge, I can drill down to find out where this workload comes from and what resource is being pushed most, by what object (ie: “VM A” is utilizing the most memory and storage while “VM B” is utilizing the most storage I/O).

vSphere Capacity Planning with vCenter Ops “Planning” Tab

If your daily operating tab indicates that your vSphere infrastructure is running smoothly, what is expected to happen in the long term? Now move on to the vCOPS Planning tab. This is where you analyze capacity, for the long-term. After all, you need to know answers to questions like “how long before I run out of memory?” or “how many more virtual machines can I add on my current SAN?”

Under capacity, you’ll see the following sub-badges:

  • Risk
  • Time
  • Capacity
  • Stress
  • Efficiency
  • Waste
  • Density

All of these badges indicate the long-term capacity, from a specific aspect, of your virtual infrastructure. You’ll use these to find waste in your storage, how long before you run out of capacity of a certain resource, the risk of poor performance, and the stress that your vSphere infrastructure is under.

 


Figure 4: vCOPS Capacity Planning Summary Tab

In the above graphic, you can see that, at least in my lab environment, I have greater than one year of capacity remaining for CPU and can add 57 more virtual machines before I am out of capacity. It would be fascinating to look at similar capacity planning reports on production virtual infrastructures.

From the information gleaned from the daily Operations tab and the long-term Planning tab, you can both solve your daily performance problems and prevent long-term capacity issues in the vSphere infrastructure.

My Take on vCenter Operations

Certainly vCenter Operations is an impressive tool however, I have used 10+ different vSphere performance and capacity tools in my time working with vSphere. Every tool has its own set of good and bad. Here’s my take on vCOPS:

  • It’s pretty and the graphic interface is attractive
  • It’s for the enterprise, large scale, not for the SMB to quickly answer some performance questions
  • It can be complex until you understand the variety of badges (make sure you take time to recognize these quickly and use them to their advantage)
  • It’s extensible and can be connected to other systems like HP Openview
  • It’s big and will need a fair amount of resources, just to be powered on (the CPU and RAM requirements are in my first article)
  • It’s useful and can help you solve real problems in your vSphere infrastructure, potentially paying for itself very quickly

Don’t just take my word for it, try out vCenter Operations Manager for yourself by downloading the vCenter Operations Manager 60-day evaluation here.

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