The vRealize team has always driven a “better together” solution between vRealize Automation (vRA) and vRealize Operations (vROps), and with the 8.0 releases of these products we have hit a new high. Together they become the cornerstone of any Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) and provide a pairing not seen since peanut butter and jelly first came together.

For starters, we have introduced a shared taxonomy between the two and are bringing over a number of the vRA object types into vROps like Cloud Zones, Projects, Blueprints and Deployments. This allows you to run some of the core vROps functions in the context of your vRA business plans. This includes capacity, cost, workload optimization, and troubleshooting to name a few.

Capacity

The Cloud Zone is new and important object type introduced in vRA 8.0.  It provides the base infrastructure into which you can deploy your workloads.  In order to avoid outages, you need to properly manage the capacity of your Cloud Zones.  Fortunately for you, vROps brings in the Cloud Zones and instantiates them as top-level objects.  This allows it to run its capacity analytics against the underlying infrastructure.  This means you can quickly answer question like:

• How much capacity is left in my Cloud Zone?
• What are the current capacity trends in my Cloud Zone?
• When will I run out of resources in my Cloud Zone?
• How many more VMs can I fit into my Cloud Zone?

Being able to answer these questions is critical to guaranteeing your Cloud Zone never runs out of resources, your customers can deploy new workloads when needed, and your business applications continue to perform well by ensuring they have the resources they need. This is base Cloud Administrator kind of stuff!

Workload Optimization

Speaking of workloads getting the resources they need, lets discuss workload optimization for a moment. Maybe your Cloud Zone has plenty of available resources, but what if one or more of the clusters are short on resources? What if the workloads in those clusters are performing poorly because of lack of resources? Now imagine if there are other clusters in this Cloud Zone that have plenty of resources available. Wouldn’t you want to intelligently and automatically move these workloads to a cluster with available free resources? Of course, you would, slow applications mean unhappy customers which means more work for you. vROps Workload Optimization does just that for you. It leverages the business intent you laid out for your Projects and Deployments in vRA and the operational intent in vROps to ensure applications are always able to get to the resources they need. This self-driving optimization allows you to run the Cloud Zone hands off, and hassle free. Who wouldn’t want that…more time for golf!

Costing

Probably the most exciting advancement between vRA and vROps is how they share costing details between them.  As you recall, vROps has integrated costing into its analytics over the last several release and in this release that costing data is made available to vRA in two major ways.  First, your customers can get a pre-deployment cost right in the self-service portal in vRA.  This allows them to determine if they wish to request the deployments based on the estimated daily cost.  Of course, once they ARE deployed you can use vROps to track the ongoing costs.  These costs are also sent into vRA so you can see how much a specific deployment is costing you or the requestor.  The costs are even broken down by compute, storage, and any additional charges, so you can understand the costing details.

Or course vROps has a myriad of ways to configure your cost drivers should you wish to customize your solution beyond the out of the box settings.  Watch for a blog from Brandon Gordon on that topic in the coming weeks.  If you are lucky enough to be at VMworld Europe you can also check out his session called, “Mr. CFO, IT Is Expensive — Understand Why with vRealize Operations [HBO1138BE]”.

To summarize, in vRealize Automation you can view the costs of the individual workloads, you can view the costs of the individual deployments, and you can view the total costs of the defined projects.  Get the full picture!

Dashboards

vROps also provides several out of the box dashboards that help when managing your private cloud and I have highlighted a couple of them below.

The Environment Overview Dashboard lets you review your entire vRA managed private cloud including: Cloud Zones, Projects, Blueprints, Deployments and VMs.

The new Resource Consumption Dashboard, this is your one-stop-shop for capacity.  It lets you drill into the Cloud Accounts, Cloud Zones, Projects and Clusters and view the capacity remaining, trends and overall utilization of these constructs.

Lastly, the application owners can view the performance of their deployments within vRA.  vROps shares the CPU, memory, IOPS and network metrics of each VM in a deployment.  You will find these in vRA in the Deployments >> Monitor Tab, and by selecting the virtual machine(s) to see its performance metrics.

A great way to learn more is to check out the vRealize Cloud Management Platform web page or try a Hands on Lab.

The post vRA and vROps 8: The Peanut Butter & Jelly for Your Hybrid Cloud appeared first on VMware Cloud Management.

So, you’re thinking about leveraging VMware Cloud on AWS (or maybe you’re already there). You might be retiring old HW in your datacenter, maybe expanding your dev-ops needs, or even hosting some of your business critical apps. Regardless of your reason to adopt a hybrid cloud, you’re starting to wonder how you are going to manage this new environment.

• How do you manage the performance or your hybrid apps?
• How do you ensure capacity and manage costs?
• How do I troubleshoot outages if/when they occur?
• What about my compliance concerns for my workloads?

Fortunately vRealize Operations is the easy answer to these types of hybrid cloud management needs. It treats VMware Cloud on AWS as a first class companion and, powered by AI/ML, employs a 4 pillar approach to hybrid cloud management as shown below.

• Continuous Performance Optimization
• Efficient Capacity and Cost Management
• Intelligent Remediation
• Integrated Configuration and Compliance

These 4 pillars even show up on the start screen to help you navigate fast to the items you wish to manage.

This technical blog discusses the 4 pillars of hybrid cloud management, how vRealize Operations can help deliver those and even gives you some links to deploying it when you are ready. Let’s jump in!

Workload Optimization

The ability to meet your specific hybrid cloud business needs is paramount to your success. To that end, vRealize Operations Workload Optimization provides a self-driving component to your new VMware Cloud on AWS datacenter. The idea behind a self-driving datacenter is you just define your business and operational intent and then “take your hands off the wheel” and let vRealize Operations drive. It will monitor the environment and, when the datacenter deviates from your desired needs, it will quickly bring it back to a desired state all while honoring your intent.

Workload optimization works closely with DRS to ensure applications have the resources they need. Under its watch, VMs will be moved to other clusters within the same datacenter (or custom datacenter) to meet your performance, operational and business intent you have defined.

What is Operational and Business Intent

Operational and business intent is about helping you to meet your VMware Cloud on AWS needs. First you need to ask yourself, “What are you trying to do in your hybrid cloud?”. Are you expanding to meet dev-ops needs? Are you moving some of your tier 2 applications to retire older HW back in your private datacenter? Will there be any business critical apps running there? Based on the answers to these questions you can set up your operational and business intent. Examples of operational and business intent can include one or more of these examples:

• Assure the best application performance
• Drive license enforcement
• Meet compliance goals
• Save money on infrastructure costs
• Implement SLA tiering
• And more!

Setting up you Operational and Business Intent

Setting up your operation and business intent is very easy and can be done in 3 simple steps. In the first step, you need to determine your target utilization objective for the datacenter.  If application performance is your top concern then you spread workloads evenly over the available resources by choosing Balance.  If instead you are looking to place workloads into as few clusters as possible, lower your cost per VM and possibly repurpose/retire some hosts chose Consolidate.

In the second step, you need to configure the percentage of headroom.  Headroom allows you to choose how much risk is acceptable in a cluster.  It provides a percent buffer of CPU, memory and disk space and reduces the risk from bursts or unexpected demand spikes.  In a production environment it is not uncommon to have a 20% Headroom buffer.

Finally, you need to determine how your business needs should drive VM placement across the clusters.  vRealize Operations does this by leveraging and honoring vCenter tags.  With vCenter tags you can define what VMs should be placed on what cluster.  Simply tag the cluster(s) and the VM with the same tag and viola…Workload Optimization will make sure that workload is placed on that cluster(s).  One of the most common use cases for this feature is SLA tiering to ensure your most critical applications have access to the resources they need. In this example you simply tag specific workloads and clusters as either Gold (Tier 1) or Silver (Tier 2). Then when making move decisions vRealize Operations will ensure the Gold (Tier 1) applications are given preferential access to the clusters with the most available resources.

VSAN Aware Workload Optimization

It is important to understand VSAN, the storage layer of VMware Cloud on AWS, when moving workloads between clusters. vRealize Operations supports moving workloads within a VSAN storage based datacenter in 3 key ways.

Resync Aware

vRealize Operations understands the underlying mechanics of VSAN (e.g. VSAN resyncs) and will not generate a workload optimization plan if any vSAN clusters are currently running a resynchronization, in order to not get in the way during this time. Simple.

Respects Slack Space

Being a distributed storage solution vSAN needs free space (aka slack space) to perform certain actions that are transparent to the user. vRealize Operations is aware of this need and will not make any workload optimizations recommendations that may infringe on the slack space requirements of vSAN.

Honors Storage Policy

Storage Policies are an incredibly powerful tool that allow you to define storage protection and performance requirements using a set of rules, that are applied prescriptively to VMs and VMDKs. vRealize Workload Optimization leverages vCenter and Storage vMotion to verify the target location will properly support the storage policies before making any moves.

Automate it!

vRealize Operations enables full automation of workload optimization so you can be sure your workloads are meeting both business and operational intents around the clock.  A simple click of the Automate button and vRealize Operations takes over.

Summary

Workload Optimization needs to be one of the pillars of your VMware Cloud on AWS management strategy. Fortunately, workload optimization is a main pillar of vRealize Operations, making driving your operational and business intent easy!

For more information on Workload Optimization in vRealize Operations check out this technical blog Start Running a Self-Driving Datacenter – vRealize Operations Workload Optimization!

Efficient Capacity and Cost Management

Capacity Planning

Capacity planning for VMware Cloud on AWS works the same way it does for your on-premises vSphere clusters. As you can see below, SDDC-Datacenter is just one of many datacenters managed by vRealize Operations.

You can even track capacity remaining and VMs remaining. Pay special attention to the High Availability column, which was added in vRealize Operations to help quantify how much of a cluster’s resources are reserved for HA based on admission control.

Reclaim

Now that you know how much capacity you have remaining, you might be wondering how you can reclaim capacity. Good news is that vRealize Operations has got you covered here too. You can see which VMs are identified as reclaimable, which, if addressed, can free up capacity to run additional workloads the provide business value. The system automatically identifies powered off and idle VMs, VMs with old snapshots, and orphaned disks.

Migration Assessments

Making the decision to migrate to VMware Cloud on AWS is often the first step you’ll encounter. With vRealize Operations, you can use the Migration Planning: Public Cloud What-If scenario to help make that decision. With the What-If scenario, you can determine how many hosts will be needed and the potential cost of a new VMware Cloud on AWS environment based on existing VMs in your environment or for net new VMs that will be provisioned for the first time in VMware Cloud on AWS.

Cost Management

The Management Pack for VMware Cloud on AWS allows you to monitor the cost of your VMware Cloud on AWS environment by collecting bills from the Cloud Services portal. The management pack allows you to track your outstanding expenses, year to date costs, as well as the cost for your subscriptions, on-demand hosts, network egress charges, and purchase history.

The Management Pack for VMware Cloud on AWS is available for download on Solutions Exchange and requires a refresh token that you can generate in your Cloud Services portal.

Intelligent Remediation

To troubleshoot your VMware Cloud on AWS environment, you get to take advantage of the existing dashboards and alerts delivered out of the box for vCenter. One of the most exciting features in vRealize Operations 8.0 is the new Troubleshooting Workbench powered by AI/ML. Check the blog post by John Dias, vRealize Operations Troubleshooting Powered by Machine Learning, to see it in action and why you need to be using the Troubleshooting Workbench.

Some customers have asked for VMware Cloud on AWS specific dashboards, so Sunny Dua has published some excellent dashboards at vRealize Operations dashboards to monitor VMware Cloud on AWS which, I encourage you to check out in your environment.

Integrated Configuration and Compliance

For the Integrated Compliance pillar, we now have support for monitoring compliance for vSAN and NSX-T out of the box. Compliance even supports VMware Cloud on AWS, which includes vSAN and NSX-T as well.

Deployment and Configuration Details

Deployment

Monitoring a VMware Cloud on AWS environment starts with reviewing your deployment architecture. Depending on whether you’re using an existing vRealize Operations instance or deploying a new instance, it’s recommended to review the architecture options described in Operate VMware Cloud on AWS using vRealize Operations.

Configuration

With the release of vRealize Operations, vCenter Servers are managed as Cloud Accounts, which is consistent with the way vCenter is managed in vRealize Automation. To add a VMware Cloud on AWS vCenter:

1. Add a vCenter Cloud Account
2. Select vCenter Account Type
3. Enter the vCenter server name and credentials
4. Set the Cloud Type under Advanced Settings to VMware Cloud on AWS
5. Enable the vSAN checkbox on the vSAN tab

Making the transition to VMware Cloud on AWS doesn’t have to be painful or time consuming if you have the right management tools in place to make it easy, and vRealize Operations is all about making things “easier on you”! A great way to learn more is to download a trial of vRealize Operations and try it in your own environment! You can find more demos and videos on vrealize.vmware.com. Be sure to stay tuned here as we will have even more blogs about vRealize Operations coming soon.

The post Managing VMware Cloud on AWS with vRealize Operations appeared first on VMware Cloud Management.

Rightsizing VMs is critical to get the best performance of your vSphere infrastructure and your VMs. Rampant oversizing of VMs can cause contention at the host or cluster level, which manifest as CPU ready, CPU co-stop, VM swap, etc. Undersized VMs can cause contention inside the guest OS, which manifest as CPU queuing, memory paging, etc. Rightsizing VMs helps you achieve the best performance of the infrastructure and VMs. In this blog post I’d like to show you why I feel that vRealize Operations is the best tool available for VM rightsizing.

The first thing I’d like to cover is the difference between rightsizing and reclamation. Rightsizing is when you change the amount of resources allocated to a VM match the utilization requirements of the VM. For example, adding a vCPU if the VM is running high CPU utilization or removing memory if the server is not using all of its allocated memory. Reclaim on the other hand is deleting powered off or idle VMs, old snapshots, or orphaned disks. The main difference is that rightsizing is done for performance reasons and reclaim is done for capacity reasons. The difference in use cases are why they’re located in different pillars on the Quick Start page.

Rightsizing

To start you on your rightsizing adventure, you should start on the Quick Start page that you are greeted with when you logon to vRealize Operations.

Oversized VMs

Once you’re in the Rightsizing page, you will be presented a summary of Oversized an Undersized VMs. By expanding the Oversized VMs section at the bottom, you can see all of the VMs that have been identified as oversized. You can select one or more VMs and resize them without leaving vRealize Operations by clicking on Resize VM(s) button. By initiating the resize action from here, vRealize Operations automatically uses its connection to vCenter to make the changes to the VM. It’s even aware of hot-add, and will skip a reboot if the VM if hot-add is enabled.

If by chance, you see a VM that you want to leave oversized and you don’t want’ to be notified about it anymore, just select the VM and click Exclude VM(s). If you have a lot of VMs that you wish to exclude, you can use the Filter box to reduce the list of VMs shown (e.g VMs containing “xyz” in their name), then use the select all button to exclude VMs in bulk. You can always include the VM again by expanding Show Excluded VMs at the bottom of the page.

Undersized VMs

By clicking on the Undersized VMs section at the bottom, you can see all of the VMs that have been identified as undersized. This page works the same as the Oversized VM section. Click Resize VM(s) to resize the VMs in vCenter and Exclude VM(s) to remove them from the list.

Calculating Recommended Size

Now that I’ve shown how rightsizing works in the UI, I’d like to explain how vRealize Operations creates the recommended size for VMs. The capacity engine built into vRealize Operations leverages AI/ML technologies to create forward looking projections of the future utilization of VMs. It’s those projections that are used to determine the Recommended Size of VMs. The recommendations are not simply based on historical utilization of the VM.

There are two primary settings that affect Recommended Size for VMs, Time Remaining Risk Level and Time Remaining Score Threshold.

Conservative Time Remaining Risk Level

Setting the Time Remaining Risk Level to Conservative tells vRealize Operations to use the Upper Bound Projection when determining the Recommended Size. This can be set on the capacity overview page or in policies. Conservative is the default, and is recommended for critical environments such as production or business critical applications.

Time Remaining Score Threshold tells vRealize Operations what point in the projection to use rightsize the VM based on the number of days until the VM goes below the green threshold. The default is 120 days for yellow (warning) and 90 days for red (critical). This can be changed in policies for Virtual Machine objects.

Recommended Size, when configured for Conservative, is the recommended Usable Capacity to maintain a green state based the Upper Bound Projection. The VM needs to maintain a green state for the entire time between now and the Green Time Remaining Score Threshold set in the policy + 30 Days. The Green Time Remaining Score Threshold defaults to 120 days, so the default Recommended Size window covers the Upper Bound Projection from now to 150 days in the future.

Aggressive Time Remaining Risk Level

Setting the Time Remaining Risk Level to Aggressive tells vRealize Operations to use the Mean of the Upper Bound and Lower Bound Projections when determining the Recommended Size. This can be set on the capacity overview page or in policies. Aggressive is not the default, but it can be enabled for less critical environments such as development, UAT, or test.

Time Remaining Score Threshold tells vRealize Operations what point in the projection to use rightsize the VM based on the number of days until the VM goes below the green threshold. The default is 120 days for yellow (warning) and 90 days for red (critical). This can be changed in policies for Virtual Machine objects.

Recommended Size, when configured for Aggressive, is the recommended Usable Capacity to maintain a green state based the Mean Projection. The VM needs to maintain a green state for the entire time between now and the Green Time Remaining Score Threshold set in the policy + 30 Days. The Green Time Remaining Score Threshold defaults to 120 days, so the default Recommended Size window covers the Mean Projection from now to 150 days in the future.

Recommended Size Limits

Customers often aren’t keen on making substantial changes to VMs and are looking for a more conservative approach. Recommended Size has been designed to be conservative in its recommendations as well.

Recommended Size for oversized VMs are capped at 50% of the current allocation while Recommended Size for undersized VMs are capped at 100% of the current allocation. This helps to gradually guide VMs to the Recommended Size without recommending substantial changes like 32 vCPUs down to 1 vCPU.

Historical Data

• Projection Calculation Start Point shows how much data is used to create the projection
• Exponential Decay gives higher weight to recent data points to allow the projection to react more quickly to recent changes in utilization
• Time Series Data Retention Global Setting does not impact capacity calculations
• Delete the object to reset projection calculation start point

Peaks

As you know, most workloads don’t follow a straight line for utilization. There can be various peaks in utilization over time that need to be accounted for in the projections. The impact of a peak on the projection is relative to the duration, height, and frequency of the peaks. Remember this is a projection created by the AI/ML powered capacity engine, so there isn’t a specific formula that I can give you to doublecheck the math. The way I like to explain it is, as a human looking at the historical utilization, ask yourself if the peak look significant enough to affect capacity planning and are there enough peaks that they appear to follow periodic pattern(s)? If so, you should see the impact of those peaks in the projections. In general, the more important the peak(s) look, the more impact the peak(s) have on the projection.

• Momentary peaks that are short-lived and might be one-off. These are the peaks that you would dismiss for capacity planning purposes because they don’t appear important. In general, small and short-lived peaks should have minimal impact for capacity planning and therefore have minimal impact in the projection.
  
• Sustained peaks last for a longer time and do impact projections. If the peak is not periodic, the impact on the projection lessens over time due to exponential decay.
  
• Periodic peaks exhibit cyclical patterns or waves. For example, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, last day of the month, etc. There can be multiple overlapping cyclical patterns, which will also be detected.
  

Custom VM Rightsizing Details Dashboard

There are several questions that I get asked frequently that can be addressed with some customization. To help answer those questions, I’d like to share a custom “Rightsizing Details” dashboard that I created. This custom “Rightsizing Details” dashboard, will help you address several use cases all within a single page. If you want to take advantage of this dashboard and you’re running vRealize Operations Advanced or Enterprise edition, you can download it from https://vrealize.vmware.com/sample-exchange/6791.

• How does vROps determine the recommended size for a VM?
• Which VMs are oversized?
• Which VMs are undersized?
• How do I justify the recommendation to the VM owner?
• What is the potential change to capacity if the VMs are rightsized?
• What is the potential change to VM cost if the VMs are rightsized?

How does vROps determine the recommended size for a VM?

To answer this question, I’ve added an extensive readme section directly in the dashboard. It’s not as in depth as this blog post, but there is a link to this blog post for users that wish to know more.

Which VMs are oversized?

The first widget named Oversized VMs shows all of the VMs that have been detected as oversized. There are totals to show how much you can potentially reduce allocation of resources, additional capacity needed, and potential cost increase you should expect. The secondary goal of this widget is to help justify rightsizing to management.

Which VMs are undersized?

The Undersized VMs widget is works similar to the Oversized VMs widget. It shows all of the VMs that have been detected as undersized. There are totals to show how much you may need to increase allocation of resources, capacity you can reclaim, and potential cost savings you can achieve. The secondary goal of this widget is to help justify rightsizing to management in conjunction with addressing Oversized VMs.

How do I justify the recommendation to the VM owner?

To help justify rightsizing recommendations to VM or application owners, I’ve added Recommended Size – CPU and Recommended Size – Memory widgets. By selecting a VM in either Oversized VMs or Undersized VMs widgets, you’ll see a chart with the historical utilization of the VM along with the Recommended Size for the VM. These 2 charts should make the rightsizing conversation much easier with the VM or application owner.

What is the potential change to capacity if the VMs are rightsized?

I am often asked to help quantify the overall impact to capacity if all VMs are rightsized. Answering that question is possible in vRealize Operations, but it requires Super Metrics to calculate them based on existing metrics. The key part to understand is that the change to capacity does not always correlate with the change in allocation of resources to a VM.

Reclaimable CPU Usage (GHz): If an oversized VM’s CPU usage is 100MHz before rightsizing, removing vCPU’s will won’t change its CPU usage and it should still be at 100MHz. This means there is no reclaimable capacity associated with overallocation of vCPUs. Reclaimable CPU Usage for oversized VMs will always be 0 MHz.

Reclaimable Memory Consumed (GB): An oversized VM can have reclaimable memory only if consumed memory is greater than the new recommended size of the VM. The reclaimable memory capacity is the difference between consumed memory and recommended size.

Increased CPU Usage (GHz): CPU Usage of a VM of an undersized VM is expected to be the current CPU Demand. The difference between CPU Demand and CPU Usage is the expected increase in capacity utilized after rightsizing.

Increased Memory Consumed (GB): It can be expected for consumed memory to increase by the same amount of memory recommended to add to an undersized VM.

What is the potential change to VM cost if the VMs are rightsized?

The other question I get frequently is to quantify the potential cost impact due to rightsizing. Today, vRealize Operations does not calculate that cost, but they can be calculated using Super Metrics and the capacity Super Metrics from the previous section.

Calculating the potential cost can be utilization or allocation based, depending on whether allocation model enabled for capacity.

Potential Cost Savings Calculation Detail:

Oversized CPU Utilization: $0 since Reclaimable CPU Usage (GHz) is always 0

Oversized Memory Utilization: Reclaimable Memory Consumed (GB) * Cluster Memory Base Rate

Oversized CPU Allocation: vCPU(s) to Remove * Allocation Cluster CPU Base Rate

Oversized Memory Allocation: Memory to Remove * Allocation Cluster Memory Base Rate

Potential Cost Increase Calculation Detail:

Undersized CPU Utilization: Increased CPU Usage (GHz) * Cluster CPU Base Rate

Undersized Memory Utilization: Increased Memory Consumed (GB) * Cluster Memory Base Rate

Undersized CPU Allocation: vCPU(s) to Add * Allocation Cluster CPU Base Rate

Undersized Memory Allocation: Memory to Add * Allocation Cluster Memory Base Rate

Conclusion

Calculating the Recommended Size for VMs should be less of a mystery now. I hope this explanation of how Recommended Size is calculated helps earn your trust in the recommendations offered by vRealize Operations and helps empower you to have the rightsizing conversations with your VM and application owners. All of this in the name of achieving the best performance of your vSphere infrastructure and your VMs, reclaiming unused capacity, and quantifying cost savings.

If you’re not a vRealize Operations customer, why not download a trial of vRealize Operations and try it in your own environment?

You can find more demos and videos from our community at vrealize.vmware.com.

The post Rightsizing VMs with vRealize Operations appeared first on VMware Cloud Management.

Today marks major milestone, the general availability of vRealize Operations 8.1. Every release gets better and better, and this release won’t let you down. There are so many features in this release, that I would like give you some highlights of a few of them.

Support for vSphere 7.0 with Kubernetes

I’m sure you’ve heard of vSphere 7.0 with Kubernetes. In vRealize Operations 8.1, you get visibility into the new vSphere with Kubernetes constructs. This awareness gives you the ability to troubleshoot, manage capacity, manage drift, reduce risk, and more for your Supervisor Clusters, Namespaces, vSphere Pods, and Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters.

Alert Importance

The alert importance feature is a new AI powered feature that helps identify the most important alerts to investigate first. One dimension is uses is the rarity of the alert. The rarer the alert is in your environment, the more important vRealize Operations considers the alert. Another dimension is access frequency of the object. That means the system things the objects you look at the most are the most important objects. As you can see in the screenshot, the alerts are ranked by their importance as determined by the system.

Simplified Alert Creation

Creating alerts has never been easier. The new alert creation wizard guides you through creating a new alert along with the symptoms, recommendations, policy association, and notifications in a single flow.

Slack Integration

Speaking of alert notification, you can now send alert notifications to Slack. Slack is a great tool to collaborate on troubleshooting alerts, and what better way than to start from the alert details sent right to a Slack channel?

Logs as Metrics

Yes, you read that right. Logs as metrics from vRealize Log Insight 8.1 are available. You can read more about the new exciting features, including logs as metrics, here.

vRealize Network Insight Integration

Do you have both vRealize Operations and vRealize Network Insight? If so, you must check out the new management pack. This management pack integrates the alerts from vRealize Network Insight with the related NSX-V and NSX-T objects in vRealize Operations. This gives you additional network visibility in the AI powered Troubleshooting Workbench. If you find an object that you need to investigate, actions to launch vRealize Network Insight in context will take you directly to the object in vRealize Network Insight to continue troubleshooting the network.

Efficient Capacity and Cost Management

New cost reports are available out of the box. The Virtual Machine Cost Report is a popular one for creating showback reports. You can run it against your entire environment to see the cost of all of your VMs, or you can run it on more granular objects (e.g. VM Folder, Custom Group, Resource Pool, etc.) to get a showback report for a group of virtual machines.

Rate Card based Pricing

Not only does vRealize Operations calculate the cost of your VMs, but if you have vRealize Automation 8.1, you can now use vRealize Operations to calculate the price of your VMs. The easiest way to understand the difference between cost and price is to think of cost as how much you spent to run a VM and price is how much you charge the VM owner for running their VM. It’s up to you if you want to set the price based on cost or define your own pricing structure. If you want to read more about VM pricing, check out this blog post.

VMware Cloud on AWS

VMware Cloud on AWS is available as a native Cloud Account type. What this means is that once you provide a Cloud Services Portal API Token, the wizard will automatically discover your SDDCs and walk you through configuring vCenter, NSX-T, vSAN, and Service Discovery for each discovered SDDC. Yes, you read that right, you can monitor NSX-T in VMware Cloud on AWS now too.

Once you have your VMC Cloud Account added, you will see brand new VMC specific dashboards, which include monitoring the management VMs and the cost of your environment from the invoices available in the CSP portal. Don’t forget that vRealize Operations treats VMC as though it’s another vCenter, so all the pages, dashboards, and reports you use today for your on-premises vCenter applies to VMC as well.

Google Cloud

In addition to the native support for AWS and Azure this release adds support for Google Cloud. You can download the management pack from Solution Exchange. With this new management pack you can create true multi-cloud monitoring dashboards across all your clouds, from vSphere to VMC, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

CloudHealth

If you’re a CloudHealth customer, the Mangagement Pack for CloudHealth includes support for perspectives will make monitoring your costs even easier in vRealize Operations. This is a great companion to our new Management Pack for Google Cloud, because support for Google Cloud costs is now available. This is in addition to the existing support for AWS and Azure costs.

There are many more great features in this release. Be sure to stay tuned here as we’ll have even more blogs about vRealize Operations 8.1 coming soon. As with any new release, please be sure to read the Release Notes. If you don’t have vRealize Operations today, be sure to download a trial of vRealize Operations and try it in your own environment! You can find more demos and videos on vrealize.vmware.com.

The post Announcing General Availability of vRealize Operations 8.1 appeared first on VMware Cloud Management.

The financial aspect of deploying VMs is becoming more critical as usage of cloud increases. Showing the price of VMs to end users can help influence their behavior when requesting new VMs and maintaining their existing VMs. With the release of vRealize Automation 8.1 and vRealize Operations 8.1, defining the prices of your VMs is now more powerful than ever.

With vRealize Operations, there are two ways of looking at looking at VMs from a financial perspective. The first is cost, which is how much you, as the provider of the infrastructure for the VM, spend to run the VM on behalf of your customer. In vRealize Operations, you configure Cost Drivers to let the system automatically determine how much a VM costs based on what your infrastructure costs. Cost Drivers cover server hardware, storage, licenses, application, maintenance, labor, network, facilities, and additional costs configured within vRealize Operations.

Price is how much you charge your customer for running their VM. The price of a VM can be based on the cost of the VM or based on a rate card that you define. Prices can include upcharges, profit, service charges, etc.

While vRealize Operations calculates both VM cost and price, the integration with vRealize Automation is designed to always show the VM price. This gives you, as the cloud admin, the ability to define prices as you see fit for your infrastructure and use case.

Daily Price Estimate

The first feature that an end user will see is the Daily Price Estimate, which is calculated by vRealize Operations. When the user is preparing a blueprint request, vRealize Automation shows the end user the Daily Price Estimate based on how pricing is configured.

Deployment Price

Once a blueprint is deployed, vRealize Operations calculates the prices of the VMs. Prices are updated in vRealize Automation every 24 hours so the user can see the prices of their VMs in Service Broker.

After selecting a deployment, the user can even see the price of their VMs over time at daily, weekly, or monthly intervals.

Cloud Automation Project Price Overview Dashboard

Within vRealize Operations, the Cloud Automation Project Price Overview dashboard is available out of the box to allow you to see the same VM prices that are visible in vRealize Automation. This helps to ensure both you and the end user can see the same data from both products.

Pricing Cards

Now that you know what it looks like for end users, I’m sure you’re wondering how you configure pricing. I’ll assume you have already integrated vRealize Operations inside vRealize Automation and integrated vRealize Automation inside vRealize Operations. If you need help with the integration please refer to the documentation here and here.

Pricing Card Scope

The first decision you need to decide how you want to apply Pricing Cards. You two options to select from, Projects (the default) and Cloud Zones. If you select Projects, Pricing Cards can be applied to Projects. You should select Projects if you need to charge different rates per team or group represented by a Project. With the Cloud Zone option , Pricing Cards are applied to Cloud Zones. You should select Cloud Zones if you have different prices based on the Cloud Zone itself and don’t need define different prices per Project. For example, your development Cloud Zone might have cheaper rates than your production Cloud Zone. It’s recommended to make this decision before you start defining your Pricing Cards.

Default Pricing Card

The Default Pricing Card is configured to be based on cost times a factor of 1. This means that the daily price of the VM will be the cost of the VM over the last day * 1.

Basic Charges – Cost Factor

Under Basic Charges, the Cost option is what allows you to tell the system to calculate price based on cost times the factor. If, for example, you wanted to make the price equal to the cost with a 10% markup, you would set the factor to 1.1. This is configurable for CPU, Memory, Storage, and Additional Cost.

Basic Charges – Rate

Under Basic Charges, the Rate option allows you to configure prices based on the resources allocated to the VM. In this mode, the VM’s price has no relationship to the VM’s cost. It’s recommended to configure vCPU and Memory to “Only when powered on” because when the VM is powered off, it does not consume CPU or Memory resources. For Storage, it’s best to configure it as “Always” because the VM always consume storage regardless of it’s power state.

Guest OSes

The Guest OSes section allows you to add the price of the operating system inside the guest OS. The Guest OS Name must match the Summary|Guest Operating System|Guest OS From Tools property on the VM for the price to be added. The best way to determine the appropriate string is to deploy a VM and look at the value of the Summary|Guest Operating System|Guest OS From Tools property.

The recurring allows you to specify the price at an hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly intervals. One time price is applied only once at the time of provisioning. Rate factor allows you to apply a multiplier to the VM’s Total, CPU, Memory, or Storage price.

Tags

The Tags option allows you to add prices based on the existence of a specific tag category and value. Just like with Guest OSes above, you can select from recurring, one time, and rate factor.

Some examples where this can be useful is to add a setup charge for newly deployed VMs if the tag exists, add monthly software charges based on a tag, charge double for storage for VMs that are backed up or charge triple for VMs that are replicated for DR.

Custom Properties

Custom Properties option works the same way as Tags mentioned above, except it’s based on the existence of specific Custom Properties instead of Tags. The same use cases apply here.

Overall Charges

The final option is Overall Charges. The first option here is One time, which acts like a setup charge for all newly deployed VMs. The other option is Recurring, which is a charge that applies to all VMs over the interval specified.

Assignment

Now that you’ve defined all of the pricing options in the new Pricing Card, you have to select a Project or Cloud Zone for the Pricing Card. All VMs deployed in the Project or Cloud Zone will be priced based on this new Pricing Card.

Pricing in vRealize Operations

In vRealize Operations, prices are available as metrics on Virtual Machine, Deployment, and Project objects. All of these metrics represent the daily price, or the price of the VM over the last day. The price metric names are:

• Summary|Metering|Total price
• Summary|Metering|CPU price
• Summary|Metering|Memory price
• Summary|Metering|Storage price
• Summary|Metering|Additional price

In vRealize Automation, you see MTD Price (month to date), while vRealize Operations stores prices as daily prices. vRealize Automation automatically handles converting daily price to MTD Price for the user. If you would like to create custom dashboards in vRealize Operations to show MTD Price, you’ll need to create a list view with transformation set to sum and time settings set to the first minute of the month.

Troubleshooting

When new VMs are deployed, the price of the VM will not show up immediately in vRealize Automation. There are a few steps to the process that take time to complete. At 9 PM UTC, vRealize Operations calculates the VM’s cost. At 12 AM UTC (Midnight), vRealize Operations calculates the VM’s price. If the Pricing Card is configured to calculate price based on cost, the price will not be calculated until cost calculation for the VM is complete. The last step is price sync within vRealize Automation every 24 hours. The key to figuring out why you may not see prices is to look at the Cloud Automation Project Price Overview dashboard to see if the VM shows prices. If not, check the VM’s age, the times that cost and price calculations run, and whether vRealize Automation has synced prices since price calculations are compete.

Conclusion

I know I covered a lot on this post, but I hope you see how awesome this new feature is. If you don’t have vRealize Automation or vRealize Operations in your environment today, I recommend downloading a trial and try it in your own environment! You can find more demos and videos on vrealize.vmware.com. Be sure to stay tuned here as we will have even more blogs about vRealize Operations 8.0 coming soon.

The post VM Pricing with vRealize Automation 8.1 and vRealize Operations 8.1 appeared first on VMware Cloud Management.

On a recent call with a customer, I was asked for help showing the value of vRealize Operations from a financial perspective. Cost management has been a native feature within vRealize Operations since the 6.7 release, but the costs needed to show the Return on Investment (ROI) are available in multiple locations. Potential cost savings from reclamation are shown on the Reclaim page for reclaiming idle VMs, powered off VMs, VM snapshots, and orphaned disks. I created a custom dashboard for Rightsizing VMs with vRealize Operations which shows how to use rightsizing recommendations and super metrics to calculate the potential cost savings or increase for rightsizing VMs. Lastly, I created a Reclaimable Hosts Dashboard which uses the Total Recommended Capacity for a cluster as determined by the AI powered capacity engine to identify the number of hosts that can be removed from a cluster and still have adequate capacity (including HA). The customer asked for help consolidating these costs along with their total cost of ownership.

That’s where the ROI dashboard was born. I have gone through many iterations since the initial version and I have since shown this to many customers. The dashboard covers total cost of ownership, potential savings, and optimization costs. It has cost breakdown by cost drivers, capacity used, and datacenter as well as tracking for server depreciation. As you can see the dashboard is fairly long, but it’s designed to be shared with users that may not have access to vRealize Operations, and having a single URL helps keep things simple. I included inline documentation in the dashboard, and I’ll break down each section of the dashboard below.

Total Cost of Ownership

Total Cost of Ownership is the monthly cost of server hardware, licenses, maintenance, facilities, labor, network, storage, and additional costs.

Potential Savings covers the cost savings opportunities identified by vRealize Operations.

Optimization Opportunities covers the projected costs to improve performance as identified by vRealize Operations. While this represents an increase to cost, it can be offset by the potential savings.

Total Cost of Ownership with Potential Savings and Optimization Opportunities is the projected Total Cost of Ownership if all Potential Savings and Optimization Opportunities are realized.

Potential Savings and Optimization Opportunities (%) is ratio of Potential Savings and Optimization Opportunities with the Total Cost of Ownership.

Use the Total Cost of Ownership chart to track the progress of your savings over time.

Additional Resources:

• Total Economic Impact of VMware vRealize Operations: 2019 Study by Forrester
• VMware vRealize Self-Driving Operations ROI Estimator

Average Cost per VM

Average Cost per VM is the Total Cost of Ownership / Total Number of VMs. Average Cost per VM is a good indicator of cost efficiency over time. It’s natural for the cost per VM to go up when new capacity is added and trend downwards as the additional capacity is consumed. The goal is to reduce the average cost per VM over time.

Total Cost of Ownership Breakdown

The Total Cost of Ownership Breakdown section allows viewing the total cost of ownership by cost drivers, capacity used, and datacenter. These breakdowns should help you identify the factors that contribute to infrastructure costs.

Cost Driver Breakdown

Total Cost of Ownership broken down by the individual Cost Drivers.

Improve the accuracy of these costs by editing Cost Drivers at Administration / Configuration / Cost Settings / Cost Drivers. Documentation for editing Cost Drivers is available here. Cost Drivers that are not customized use reference cost.

Note: Advanced or Enterprise edition is required to customize Cost Drivers.

This diagram is included in the dashboard to show how the cost drivers feed into host, cluster, datastore, datacenter, and VM costs.

Cost of Capacity Used vs. Remaining

View the Total Cost of Ownership broken down by the cost of capacity used and the cost of capacity remaining.

Cost of Compute Capacity Used is the portion of the compute costs that are accounted for in the compute cost of existing VMs.

Cost of Compute Capacity Remaining covers the remaining compute costs not used by existing VMs.

Cost of Storage Capacity Used is the portion of the storage costs that are accounted for in the storage cost of existing VMs.

Cost of Storage Capacity Remaining covers the remaining storage costs not used by existing VMs.

VM Direct Costs apply only to VMs themselves and are not reliant on compute or storage costs.

Cost per Datacenter

View the Total Cost of Ownership broken down by datacenter. Identify potential outliers for further investigation.

Server Hardware Depreciation

Depreciation is automatically calculated by vRealize Operations for server hardware marked as owned in Cost Drivers at Administration / Configuration / Cost Settings / Cost Drivers. Configure depreciation in Financial Accounting Model settings to align with business requirements.

Server Purchase Cost is the total purchase price of all servers as entered in Cost Drivers at Administration / Configuration / Cost Settings / Cost Drivers.

Accumulated Depreciation is the amount of server purchase costs that have been depreciated according to purchase date and depreciation settings.

Remaining Depreciation is the amount of server purchase costs left to be depreciated.

Number of Fully Depreciated Servers identifies servers that have been fully depreciated. These servers may exhibit higher failure rates or have lower capacity. Use What-If scenarios to model the cost and capacity impact of replacing these servers.

Note: Costs for leased servers are visible in the Cost Driver Breakdown section above.

Cost Savings Breakdown

Potential Savings covers the cost savings opportunities identified by vRealize Operations.

Reclaimable Capacity shows the amount of capacity that can be recovered per reclamation type. More details are available on the Reclaim page.

Allocation Changes for Oversized VMs shows the number of vCPUs and GB of memory to remove from oversized VMs. More details are available on the Rightsizing page and VM Rightsizing Details dashboard.

Optimization Opportunities Breakdown

Optimization Opportunities covers the projected costs to improve performance as identified by vRealize Operations.

Allocation Changes for Undersized VMs shows the number of vCPUs and GB of memory to add to undersized VMs. More details are available on the Rightsizing page and VM Rightsizing Details dashboard.

Installing the Dashboard

As stated above, the ROI dashboard builds on top of other dashboards that I’ve created. To install the ROI dashboard, you’ll need to install all 4 of these dashboards. Each dashboard has installation instructions to guide you through the process.

• Reclaimable Resources Details Dashboard for vRealize Operations
• VM Rightsizing Details Dashboard for vRealize Operations
• Reclaimable Hosts Dashboard for vRealize Operations
• ROI Dashboard for vRealize Operations
• Data should start showing after the first cost calculation completes. Cost calculations run daily at 9 PM appliance time, which is UTC by default.
• After a few days, the charts should start filling in as shown in the dashboard screenshots.

Share the Dashboard

Now that you have the dashboard installed, you can share it with others by clicking on the share icon as indicated with a red arrow.

Select URL sharing, set the expiration, copy the link, and send it to the people interested in your infrastructure costs.

A video walkthrough of the dashboard is also available here.

I hope this dashboard gives you better insight into your infrastructure costs and the potential savings that you can achieve with vRealize Operations. Be sure to stay tuned here as we’ll have even more blogs about vRealize Operations. If you don’t have vRealize Operations today, be sure to download a trial of vRealize Operations and try this dashboard in your own environment! You can find more demos and videos on vrealize.vmware.com.

The post ROI Dashboard for vRealize Operations 8.1 and vRealize Operations Cloud appeared first on VMware Cloud Management.

VMworld is just around the corner and even though we won’t be able to meet face-to-face this year I’m still looking forward to it! It’s going to be a great event for you, VMware and for our vRealize Cloud Management solutions. As we do at every VMworld we refresh our Hands-on-Labs content for you so you can get some “stick time” with the latest and greatest in the management stack. While we are saving a few super-secret and special labs to bring to you at the event, we wanted to give you early access to some of the labs now…you know…so you can kickstart your VMworld experience a month early. I’ve provided you a list of all the recently refreshed and released lab modules for you to review below.

Click here to get to the Hands-on-Lab catalog

Jump in early and see you at VMworld!
 

vRealize Automation Labs

vRealize Operations and vRealize Log Insight Labs

vRealize Suite Labs

Don’t miss this opportunity to get close and personal with VMware vRealize Cloud Management products and services. If you are hands-on user who wants learn first hand about the newest releases, or further sharpen your existing skills through deep dive into different aspects of cloud management – check out the Hands-on Labs lineup available at VMworld.

For the full list of vRealize Cloud Management HOLs available at VMworld 2020, please see this blog post by Dave Overbeek.

Here are a few hints where to start.

For a quick overview of new features in our latest releases, check out these Lightning labs:

For deep dive and full overview of features and functions of our key products, take these full hands-on labs:

And for the full catalog of Cloud Management HOLs, see the HOL portal.

The post Not to Miss at VMworld 2020: Cloud Management Hands-on Labs appeared first on VMware Cloud Management.

Ay VMworld, it is all about our customers, and we thrive on customer opinions. We’d love for you to share your vRealize story by providing a review on IT Central Station. Share a review and be seen as a thought leader, it’s as quick as a 10-minute phone call. Pick a time here to speak with an IT Central Station research analyst.

Your peers would love to hear about your experience with the following products (on-prem and/or SaaS versions):

• vRealize Operations
• vRealize Automation
• vRealize Log Insight
• vRealize Network Insight

IT Central Station is the leading product review site for enterprise technology. They have been called the “Yelp of Enterprise Tech” by the Wall Street Journal.

IT Central Station helps technology decision makers around the world to better connect with peers who provide advice without vendor bias. Reviewers can either post anonymously to freely express their views or use their real names to promote their expertise.

IT Central Station is an independent reviewer and is not affiliated with VMware.

The post Share Your vRealize Cloud Management Story appeared first on VMware Cloud Management.

It was just a few short weeks ago that VMware announced a comprehensive refresh of the entire line of vRealize Cloud Management products and services, both on-prem and SaaS. In a major announcement on August 18th, VMware introduced vRealize Operations 8.2, vRealize Automation 8.2, vRealize Log Insight 8.2 and vRealize Network Insight 5.3, as well as the SaaS versions of these offerings. Delivering advanced and innovative capabilities for modern infrastructure automation, these new versions will be generally available later in Q3.

But, that was then… now, at VMworld, we are moving forward with even more exciting news.

What’s Coming at VMworld 2020!

VMworld is, more than anything, an opportunity to learn what’s new at VMware. This year vRealize Cloud Management proudly carries the “what’s new” banner for the company with two exciting firsts:

• VMware vRealize Cloud Universal is our first “hybrid” solution that offers full end-to-end automation, operations, and log analytics capabilities, providing customers the opportunity to consume our cloud management solutions on-premises or as SaaS in a single subscription-based offering. vRealize Cloud Universal enables customers to evolve to cloud at their own pace, preserving existing investments as they increasingly benefit from the advantages of SaaS.
• Another significant first is the integration of VMware Skyline with vRealize Operations. VMware is the first cloud infrastructure company to integrate its proactive support and management solutions, providing customers with a seamless experience to proactively avoid issues and effectively manage their hybrid cloud environments. More of these integrations – designed to deliver peace of mind to our customers – are planned.

Over the last several quarters, VMware has evolved our cloud management capabilities into the industry’s leading, end-to-end solution managing all aspects of our customer’s multi-cloud environments. Our vRealize products – available both on-prem and as SaaS – deliver automation and operations, log and network management capabilities across both hybrid and public clouds, while CloudHealth ensures cost optimization and governance across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and, now, Oracle Cloud. This comprehensive approach to cloud management enables organizations to consistently deploy, operate, and govern applications, infrastructure, and platform services across any cloud environment.

In this article, see the news and updates on:

• vRealize Cloud Universal
• vRealize Network Insight
• VMware Skyline
• VMware Cloud Health

vRealize Cloud Universal: Adopt Management as SaaS at Your Pace

vRealize Cloud Universal is a flexible, cloud management subscription offering that combines on-premises and SaaS into one license, supporting business transition to the cloud and providing the flexibility to manage hybrid and multi-cloud environments on-premises and in the cloud. It not only equips customers with flexible licensing and consumption options, but it also includes powerful new features including: vRealize AI Cloud, vRealize Cloud Federated Catalog and vRealize Cloud Federated Analytics, vRealize Cloud Subscription Manager, and VMware Skyline proactive intelligence.

Learn more about vRealize Cloud Universal here.

VMware vRealize AI Cloud: Self-optimization of Your Software-defined Infrastructure

vRealize AI Cloud (formerly Project Magna), included in vRealize Cloud Universal subscription, is a self-optimizing service that uses machine learning and reinforcement learning techniques to continuously learn, adapt, and optimize your software defined infrastructure. At VMworld we are launching the first version of vRealize AI Cloud for vSAN optimization to help ensure consistent and optimal performance for your mixed application workloads.  As workloads get scaled out or migrated to different clusters or datacenters, vRealize AI Cloud will dynamically adjust vSAN tunable parameters to continuously optimize KPIs such as I/O read and write throughput and network latency.

Learn more details at this blog

VMware Skyline Brings Proactive Intelligence to vRealize Cloud Management and VMware Cloud Foundation

Integration with vRealize Cloud Management

Skyline’s integration with vRealize Operations Cloud expands proactive issue avoidance, troubleshooting and automated workflows in a unified management and support experience. Skyline is now included in vRealize Cloud Universal subscription and VMware’s new Success 360 services offering. It continues to be included with Production and Premier Support subscriptions.

Support for VMware Cloud Foundation

Skyline will support VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), the industry’s leading hybrid cloud platform. Skyline will identify VCF management and workload domains, and surface VCF solution-based Proactive Findings.

Check out Skyline at VMworld 2020 here.

vRealize Network Insight 6.0 and Cloud: NSX_T, SD-WAN, AWS, and More!

VMware is announcing another exciting new release for vRealize Network Insight 6.0 (on-prem) and vRealize Network Insight Cloud (SaaS). This release enhances the visibility and analytics for NSX-T, VMware SD-WAN and VMware Cloud on AWS, as well as other aspects of your software-defined infrastructure. Key features are new network assurance and verification capabilities to determine whether the network is meeting its intended goals.

vRealize Operations 8.2 will now be able to include applications discovered in vRealize Network Insight and merge this new information with other existing application data for better application correlation.

In this release, application performance visibility for VMware SD-WAN will be enhanced to include SD-WAN path tunnel visibility and round-trip time latency for richer flow visibility.

There are several enhancements for VMware Cloud on AWS including Hybrid Connectivity: Layer 2 Extension with HCX in VMware Cloud on AWS. vRealize Network Insight Cloud and vRealize Network Insight will provide stitched flow visibility over HCX stretched Layer 2 VLAN connections between VMware Cloud SDDCs. This new capability enables customers to monitor migrations with VMware HCX and prevent network performance issues.

Explore more details at this blog post

VMware Cloud Health: Managing Costing for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and Advanced Security and Compliance

Multi-cloud Operations for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

With the newly released functionality, CloudHealth by VMware now supports Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), enabling enterprises to view all public cloud costs from a single platform. Enterprises gain visibility into usage of OCI Pay-As-You-Go (on-demand) and Monthly Flex (Reservation) purchase models so they can make better decisions about proper usage of each. Customers can also group assets by business unit, department, cost center, and owner, for cost reporting and showback using OCI tags and CloudHealth’s Perspectives capability.

Learn more details at this blog post

Multi-cloud Security Posture Management and Compliance

CloudHealth Secure State has helped organizations discover more than 10 million security and compliance risks in AWS and Azure to date. The service is now adding real-time monitoring for Google Cloud, as well as 20 new AWS and Azure services, including managed Kubernetes and serverless workloads. Additionally, organizations can more effectively scale security and improve collaboration between teams through simplified management of cloud accounts, custom compliance frameworks, and Azure auto-remediation support.

Learn more details at this blog post

The post VMworld 2020: What’s New from VMware Cloud Management appeared first on VMware Cloud Management.

451 Research is a global research and advisory firm. It generates the data-driven insight that empowers technology and service providers, IT leaders and financial professionals to capitalize on their market opportunity. In this new report, 451 Research is taking a look at VMware’s multi-cloud management line of solutions, specifically covering CloudHealth and vRealize brands.

451 Research: “VMware is expanding options across its portfolio of cloud management products in an aim to extend its reach and influence among enterprises with active cloud deployments and those taking the first steps in a journey to the cloud. At VMworld 2020, the firm announced major changes across the CloudHealth public cloud management platform and the vRealize hybrid cloud management platform.”

The report studies the entire spectrum of VMware’s cloud management portfolio, focusing on the two key brands – CloudHealth and vRealize – to address key use cases, and in particular the uncertainties introduced by the Covid-19 pandemic. It uses interesting data on migration of workloads to cloud amid the pandemic as it applies to the latest releases of VMware Cloud Management products. It also touched on the competition, and provides a SWAT analysis for VMware Cloud Management across the entire spectrum of solutions.

Download the report here. 451_VMware expands CloudHealth and vRealize cloud management platform

The post Download a Research Note on VMware Cloud Management from Global Analyst Firm appeared first on VMware Cloud Management.

Let’s face it, the modern datacenter is no longer this monolithic structure that’s immobile, heavy, and slow to scale as you search for more physical real estate to deploy your servers, applications and infrastructure. It’s quick, agile, flexible, and spread across private clouds, hybrid clouds, public clouds and multi-clouds. But this also presents visibility complexities which could lead to trouble for IT teams. How do you protect and scale what you can’t see?

Without 360 visibility, it becomes more challenging to plan for new deployments and migrations while trying to factor in cost and optimal performance for your business. But with vRealize Operations and vRealize Operations Cloud, powered by AI, it brings unified monitoring and visibility for consistent operations across private and public clouds.

Check out this infographic to learn more about how vRealize Operations and vRealize Operations Cloud helps bridge that gap across the datacenter stack to AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and VMware supported public clouds as VMware Cloud on AWS, VMware Cloud Foundation, Azure VMware Solutions, and Google Cloud VMware Engine!

For more information:

Check out guided paths for vRealize Operations, vRealize Operations Cloud, and other vRealize cloud management solutions on our new VMware Pathfinder site that covers detailed usage for:

• Performance Optimization
• Capacity and Cost Management
• Intelligent Troubleshooting
• Integrated Compliance
• Interactive Analytics
• Dashboards & Management Packs

The post Unified Visibility Across Clouds with vRealize Operations appeared first on VMware Cloud Management.

vRealize Operations includes a wide range of customizable dashboards to get you started with managing your Multi-Cloud infrastructure. The predefined dashboards address several aspects including troubleshooting your VMs, the workload distribution of your hosts, clusters, and datastores, the capacity of your data center, and information about the VMs.

In the video series, “vRealize Operations Dashboards Made Easy” you will learn everything you need to efficiently use the out-of-the-box dashboards and create your own new custom dashboards.

The first two videos of the series, available on our
VMware Cloud Management YouTube channel:

Dashboards Made Easy – Part 1 – Introduction

Dashboards Made Easy – Part 2 – Common Widgets

In these two videos I will show you:

• How to find and access the predefined dashboards
• The basic concepts comprising a dashboard
• How to use dashboard time and widget’s menus
• What are the most used widgets and what are the use cases for widgets like:
  • Object list
  • Scoreboard
  • Heatmap
  • Health Chart
  • Metric Chart
  • Advanced Object Relationship
  • Top-N
  • Top Alerts

In the next blog post, I’ll show you how you can start creating your own dashboards. You’ll learn how to create a simple dashboard and even include more advanced widgets that will help give you the complete picture. You can also view the full vRealize Operations Dashboards Made Easy series in the playlist available here.

For more information and technical deep dives on vRealize Operations, check out pathfinder.vmware.com. Here, you’ll find basic to hands-on information about the key capabilities of vRealize Operations as well as the rest of the vRealize Suite. For more information on vRealize Operations and vRealize Operations Cloud or to sign up for a free trial, visit the product page here.

The post vRealize Operations Dashboards Made Easy – Part 1-2 Introduction to Dashboards appeared first on VMware Cloud Management.

In my previous blog post, I introduced the new video series “vRealize Operations Dashboards Made Easy“.

In parts 3 – 5 of the series, which are available here:

Dashboards Made Easy – Part 3 – Creating a Simple Dashboard

Dashboards Made Easy – Part 4 – Enhancing a Simple Dashboard

Dashboards Made Easy – Part 5 – Creating an Advanced Dashboard

You will learn how to create your own custom vRealize Operations Dashboards, starting with an easy use case and progressing to more complex scenarios.

These three parts of the video series focus on:

• Creating a simple dashboard based on a real use case
• Placing, moving, resizing, and configuring widgets on the canvas
• Interaction between widgets
• Creating a more complex dashboard, starting with pen and paper
• Object relationships and inventory trees

In the next blog post, I’ll show you how you can enhance your dashboards. You’ll learn how to include vRealize Operations Views in your custom dashboards and how to configure a few more advanced widgets that will help make your dashboards more interactive and re-usable. You can also view the full vRealize Operations Dashboards Made Easy series in the playlist available here.

For more information and technical deep dives on vRealize Operations, check out pathfinder.vmware.com. Here, you’ll find basic to hands-on information about the key capabilities of vRealize Operations as well as the rest of the vRealize Suite. For more information on vRealize Operations and vRealize Operations Cloud or to sign up for a free trial, visit the product page here.

The post vRealize Operations Dashboards Made Easy – Part 3-5 Creating Dashboards appeared first on VMware Cloud Management.

In my previous blog post, I introduced parts 3 through 5 of the video series “vRealize Operations Dashboards Made Easy” focusing on creating your own dashboards.

In parts 6 – 7 of the series, which are available here:

Dashboards Made Easy – Part 6 – Views in Dashboards

Dashboards Made Easy – Part 7 – Widgets Deep Dive

You will learn how to include vRealize Operations Views in your dashboards, and how to get more out of the available widgets.

These two parts of the video series focus on:

• Adding views to dashboards
• How the self-provider option works for views
• Creating multiple views within one heatmap widget
• Creating re-usable metric configurations

In the next blog post, I’ll show you how you can export and import vRealize Operations Content. You’ll learn how to share dashboards with other users and teams giving them a powerful tool to help them manage their environments. You will also learn where to find more useful dashboards and other vRealize Operations content. You can also view the full vRealize Operations Dashboards Made Easy series in the playlist available here.

For more information and technical deep dives on vRealize Operations, check out pathfinder.vmware.com. Here, you’ll find basic to hands-on information about the key capabilities of vRealize Operations as well as the rest of the vRealize Suite. For more information on vRealize Operations and vRealize Operations Cloud or to sign up for a free trial, visit the product page here.

The post vRealize Operations Dashboards Made Easy – Part 6-7 Diving deeper into Views and Widgets appeared first on VMware Cloud Management.

In my previous blog post, I introduced parts 6 and 7 of the video series “vRealize Operations Dashboards Made Easy” focusing on vRealize Operations Views as building parts of dashboards and efficient usage of widgets and widget configurations.

In parts 8 – 10 of the series, which are available here:

Dashboards Made Easy – Part 8 – Export and Import Dashboards

Dashboards Made Easy – Part 9 – Sharing Dashboards

Dashboards Made Easy – Part 10 – Get More Dashboards

You will learn how to export and import vRealize Operations Dashboards and other content. You’ll learn how to share dashboards with other users and teams, and where to find more useful vRealize Operations content. 

These three parts of the video series focus on:

• Exporting and importing dashboards
• Sharing dashboards using the URL Sharing option
• Sharing dashboards with vRealize Operations users
• Where to find additional Dashboards and other vRealize Operations content

For more information and technical deep dives on vRealize Operations, check out pathfinder.vmware.com. Here, you’ll find basic to hands-on information about the key capabilities of vRealize Operations as well as the rest of the vRealize Suite. For more information on vRealize Operations and vRealize Operations Cloud or to sign up for a free trial, visit the product page here.

The post vRealize Operations Dashboards Made Easy – Part 8-10 Dashboard Sharing with your Team and Beyond appeared first on VMware Cloud Management.

Using its native solutions and additional Management Packs vRealize Operations collects data about your entire environment including various metrics and properties to get you started with managing your Multi-Cloud infrastructure. The predefined metrics and properties address nearly all aspects of SDDC management. But sometimes you will need to transform available metrics, calculate new metrics using existing ones or attach metrics coming from several objects to another related object.

In the video series, “vRealize Operations Super Metrics Made Easy” you will learn everything you need to create your own new super metrics.

Here are the first three videos of the series, available on our
VMware Cloud Management YouTube channel:

Super Metrics Made Easy Part 1 – Introduction

Super Metrics Made Easy Part 2 – Creating Your First Simple Super Metric

Super Metrics Made Easy Part 3 – Creating Your First “Real” Super Metric

In these three videos I will show you:

• What Super Metrics are and how they work
• When Super Metrics comes into play in vRealize Operations
• What is the general workflow when creating Super Metrics
• How to create simple and less simple Super Metrics
• How to enable Super Metrics for specified object types using vRealize Operations Policies

In the next blog post and the related parts of this video series, I’ll show you how to create some more complex Super Metrics leveraging other functions available in vRealize Operations. You will also learn how to create Super Metrics using the “this” option and the “if-then-else” statement. You can also view the full vRealize Operations Dashboards Made Easy series in the playlist available here.

For more information and technical deep dives on vRealize Operations, check out pathfinder.vmware.com. Here, you’ll find basic to hands-on information about the key capabilities of vRealize Operations as well as the rest of the vRealize Suite. For more information on vRealize Operations and vRealize Operations Cloud or to sign up for a free trial, visit the product page here.

The post vRealize Operations Super Metrics Made Easy – Part 1-3 Introduction to Super Metrics appeared first on VMware Cloud Management.

In my previous blog post, I introduced the new video series “vRealize Operations Super Metrics Made Easy“.

In parts 4 – 6 of the series, which are available here:

Super Metrics Made Easy – Part 4 – More Super Metrics 

Super Metrics Made Easy – Part 5 – “This” Option in Super Metrics

Super Metrics Made Easy – Part 6 – “If-Then-Else” Statement in Super Metrics

You will learn how to create more vRealize Operations Super Metrics, leveraging other provided functions and statements.

These three parts of the video series focus on:

• Other available functions like min() and max() in Super Metrics
• When and how to create Super Metrics using the “this” option
• When and how to create Super Metrics containing the “if-then-else” statement using the ternary notation.

In the next blog post, I’ll show you how you can export and import vRealize Operations Content including Super Metrics. You will also learn where to find more Super Metric examples and other vRealize Operations content. I will also share some very helpful tips when creating Super Metrics. You can also view the full vRealize Operations Super Metrics Made Easy series in the playlist available here.

For more information and technical deep dives on vRealize Operations, check out pathfinder.vmware.com. Here, you’ll find basic to hands-on information about the key capabilities of vRealize Operations as well as the rest of the vRealize Suite. For more information on vRealize Operations and vRealize Operations Cloud or to sign up for a free trial, visit the product page here.

The post vRealize Operations Super Metrics Made Easy – Part 4-6 Creating Super Metrics appeared first on VMware Cloud Management.

In my previous blog post, I introduced parts 4 – 6 of the video series “vRealize Operations Super Metrics Made Easy” focusing on creating Super Metrics using other available functions and efficient usage of the “this” option and the “if-then-else” statement.

In part 7 of the series, which is available here:

Super Metrics Made Easy – Part 7 – Export-Import and Tips

You will learn how to export and import vRealize Operations Super Metrics and other content. You’ll learn where to find more useful examples of Super Metrics and other vRealize Operations content. I will also show you a few tips and tricks when creating your own vRealize Operations Super Metrics.

You can also view the full vRealize Operations Super Metrics Made Easy series in the playlist available here.

These three parts of the video series focus on:

• Exporting and importing vRealize Operations Content including Super Metrics
• Where to find additional Super Metrics and other vRealize Operations content
• A few tips and tricks  to help avoid common mistakes and make your Super Metrics more efficient

For more information and technical deep dives on vRealize Operations, check out pathfinder.vmware.com. Here, you’ll find basic to hands-on information about the key capabilities of vRealize Operations as well as the rest of the vRealize Suite. For more information on vRealize Operations and vRealize Operations Cloud or to sign up for a free trial, visit the product page here.

The post vRealize Operations Super Metrics Made Easy – Part 7 Exporting and Importing Super Metrics + Tips and Tricks appeared first on VMware Cloud Management.

During VMworld 2021 we announced vRealize Operations 8.6 which now provides allot of new features and capabilities. You can see an Whats New overview here as well as a feature walk through here.

I this blog we will be focusing specifically on the Administration menu and how it maps to the new 8.6 release. I covered the UI Navigation on my blog here.

As you might be aware the Administration has now been redesigned to make it easier to navigate and find items. Lets jump in to it.

The first item on the list is Data Sources. To make it easier to get started the Data Sources can now be found on the home page as we get started. The accounts are now grouped together by account type ex: vCenter servers, AWS, Azure and so on. The Other Accounts sub-menu has been consolidated under the same menu. Because we combined the Cloud Accounts with Other Accounts we renamed the menu as Integrations.

The repository is now another tab under the Data Sources -> Integrations -> Repository

The Inventory menu has been moved under the Environment -> Inventory

The Policies have been moved to Configure -> Policies

The Access Control and Authentication Sources can now be found under the Administration menu

Custom Profiles has been renamed to Custom VM Profiles and it can be found under Configure -> Custom VM Profile

End Point Operations functionality is now included part of the telegraf agent via the cloud proxy and this menu item has been retired as its no longer in use.

The Group Types can now be found with the Custom Groups under Environment -> Custom Groups -> Group Types

Icons is considered an Administration item and it can be found under Administration -> Icons

Maintenance Schedules are considered a Non Administration Option that an non vROPS admin should be able to configure so its been relocated to the Configure sub menu

Configuration Files are locate under Configure -> Configuration Files

The object Relationships has been removed from the UI however it can be accessed by going directly to https://vrops_instance/ui/index.action#configure/object-relationships. The URL is the same for the SaaS as well as on premise

Optimizations Schedules has been moved under the Workload Optimization. It can be found by navigating to Optimize -> Workload Placement -> Optimization Schedules

Super Metrics are under Configure -> Super Metrics

Cost Settings are found under Configure -> Cost Settings

As described earlier in this post the Integrations have been combined with Other accounts and Other Accounts under Data Sources -> Integrations

Certificates, Cluster Management, Collector Groups and Collection Status have all been moved under Administration

The credentials have been consolidated under Data Sources -> Integrations -> Credentials

Global Settings, Licensing, Log Forwarding, Content Management can all be found under Administration

Outbound Settings are found now under Configure -> Alerts -> Outbound Settings

The rest of the items like Audit, Recent Tasks, Dynamic Thresholds, Logs, Redescribe, Cost Reference Database and Support Bundles can all be found under the administration menu

For more information visit us at https://www.vmware.com/products/vrealize-operations.html

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