In my last blog article, “What is Intelligent Operations Management in the SDDC” , I discussed how intelligent operations management of the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) can be broken down into three (3) areas of focus: Topology Scope, Data Collection and Management Functions. We also talked about what each of these areas brings to […]
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On May 25th, the Getting More Out Of webinar series will present a session on vRealize Operations Manager 6.x – Full Stack Application Monitoring. As a preview, here are some highlights from the session and what you can do to prepare and get the most out of this session. First, this session will focus on […]
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On June 8th, we will be hosting a Getting More Out of VMware webinar about Distributed Resource Management using Dynamic Resource Scheduler (DRS) and vRealize Operations (vR Ops). In this session, we will examine how to combine DRS and vRealize Operations Manager capabilities to deliver the most efficient compute platform for your virtual machines. We […]
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On June 22nd, we will be hosting a Getting More Out of VMware webinar on How to Operationalize vRealize Operations for Horizon. In this session, we will demonstrate how to leverage vRealize Operations for Horizon to quickly take control of performance issues impacting End-user experience in your Horizon View environment. We will provide a deeper […]
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By: Ryan Cartwright, VMware Senior Systems Engineer & David Kruse, VMware Staff Systems Engineer
Getting More Out of vRealize Operations webinar series is kicking off the 3rd Quarter 2016 with a session called Day 2/3 Operations on July 13th, 2016. Best practices on what you can achieve on Day 3 will be discussed after you have deployed vRealize Operations (vROps) and are collecting from at least one vCenter data source. In Q1 2016, David Kruse demonstrated best practices in what you can accomplish on Day 2. Please review this blog and webinar for details.
In Day 3, the primary focus is monitoring the Application. This session will demonstrate how to build the container object and all the objects supporting the application – dashboards, views, reports, super metrics, metric configurations, and alerts that will manage the application. A few weeks ago, John Dias delivered a session called Full Stack Application Monitoring on May 25th, 2016. This was an excellent session that demonstrated the full power of using vROps as a comprehensive management platform for managing the application. This session will dive into the finished product that John presented and get you started on how you can bring this same value into your organization using vROps. If you were not able to catch John’s Getting More out of… session, I highly recommend you check it out.
Let’s take a look at what will be covered in the Day 2/3 Operations session.
Building and creating the Application and Tier objects that will represent the Application that you are modeling and would like to manage. Don’t worry, you can start slow, and gradually build up the layers to the application stack. This webinar will show you both the preferred method, using dynamic groups, as well as the legacy method which is still supported today, Application and Tier objects. Both are effective, but with the preferred method giving you the ability to have your container objects auto populate. In the below example, dynamic groups are built for the WOPR Application along with its Web, App and DB tiers.
We will need to populate the Tier groups with more object types other than Virtual Machines. So for this demonstration, Windows and Linux OS object types will be added. In Step 6 of the Day 2 Operations webinar, End-Point Operations (EPOps) is discussed. This is an agent based technology that will collect OS and Application metrics and send this data directly to vROps.
Next, a dashboard will be created to manage the WOPR application. You will see that we need to create some super metrics to get the desired results.
As you can see in the dashboard, there are metrics being calculated for the Application object, the Web Tier, and DB Tier objects. These are derived metrics that are created with vROps super metrics, then applied to the correct object type.
So how did John Dias create that custom Dashboard with Log Insight within vROps? That was pretty cool, and very valuable for troubleshooting. In this demo, you will see how to add a Log Insight Dashboard within vROps using the text widget. We’ll also talk about how to create a Log Insight Content Pack for your Application.
Understanding how Alerting and Symptoms work for Applications and their corresponding Tier objects is a very import topic. A basic understanding of the Group Object alert and how it can be modified will be illustrated. As usual, best practice is never to modify anything out of the box, but to clone this object first.
In Day 2, we discussed outbound rules for sending alerts. In this session, we will discuss Notifications. It’s important that the right people receive the right alerts, at the right time.
Every application, as minimal as it maybe, will have downtime for maintenance. Hardware/Software updates sometimes will cause application unavailability. During these maintenance windows, administrators and application owners do not want to get bombarded with alerts. This session will demonstrate how to create a Maintenance Schedule, and how to apply it. (Hint: Policies)
Join us on July 13th, where we will be answering your questions live about Day 2/3 Operations. This webinar will be a valuable use of your time.
Visit www.vmware.com/go/getmore to view the entire Getting More Out of VMware webinar series.
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Cloud Solutions for Your Data Center – Today, 2016 Cloud Megacast that You Can’t Miss!
VMware will be presenting Intelligent Operations cloud solutions for you to manage efficiently your data center, engage with cloud experts and learn performance and cloud solutions to some of the most complex environments. Join the 2016 Cloud Megacast to be held on July 27 at 12PM EST. To register for free, click here. (Live and recorded)
WHY YOU NEED TO ATTEND THIS CLOUD-FOCUSED MEGACAST EVENT
MEGACAST EVENT BACKGROUND
“The cloud” is a term that has been hijacked, twisted about, and regurgitated by many marketers with nary a thought to what it actually happening under the hood. Part of the problem is that cloud is an umbrella term for a bunch of different possibilities, but it’s too often equated with only large public cloud services.
Here’s the thing: with all of the nuance in various discrete cloud services and with each of these having different sets of pros and cons, it can get really, really confusing when you’re looking at yet more products being marketed under the cloud moniker. You need to understand the options you have at your disposal and understand how to differentiate them so that you can properly categorize new products as they come on the market.
What if you could learn about the various cloud models and also gain insight into some of the leading products in each of those models? That’s exactly what you’ll get with the 2016 Cloud MegaCast. This is your unique opportunity to educate yourself about what’s happening in across the cloud spectrum and to discover solutions to some of your most complex data center issues. Learn from VMware how we’re driving positive outcomes for our customers.
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Are you having trouble deciding how to spend your Sunday in Las Vegas? Before the frenzy of VMworld kicks in, VMware’s Cloud and Systems Engineering teams are hosting two Getting More Out of vRealize Operations workshops on Sunday, August 28th, to share best practices for utilizing vRealize Operations. Topics covered include capacity planning, resource optimization, performance troubleshooting, and application monitoring. Real-world use cases will be the basis for discussions and demonstrations so vRealize Operations customers should register to gain practical insights to take back to their environment.
Key to operations management is finding the delicate balance between end user demands and the associated costs to the business. While excess capacity might keep users happy, it’s likely to make IT leadership not satisfied which may lead to other projects being cut from the budget. Let’s stop hoarding those unnecessary resources and start to clean up your environment. Let’s give leadership a reason to let us work on those new and innovative projects. They can be self-funded with the savings from our idle and powered off Virtual Machines sitting on expensive storage to those expensive database licenses for databases that haven’t been touched in years.
In these workshops, we’ll help you to better understand your existing resource capacity and identify your primary consumers. We’ll demonstrate how vRealize Operations can provide valuable insight into overall utilization and trending to ensure you always have the required resources available to meet demand, while operating as cost-effectively as possible. Alerts and automated actions can be used to manage demand more predictably and still adhere to organizational policies, standards and regulatory requirements.
These workshops combine the best of several subjects from our popular Getting More Out of VMware webcast series—including Optimize Your Existing Capacity, Automated Actions, Load Balancing, and Workload Placement and vRealize Operations: Symptoms, Alerts, Recommendations and Actions—into three hours of interactive discussion and demonstrations.
All of our existing content can be found on our portal which is available for free 24 hours a day 7 days a week!
Let’s start your 2016 VMworld experience in Las Vegas by interacting live with your favorite Getting More Out of presenters. Join us inside and avoid the heat!
Wake up early for our morning session from 8:30am – 11:30am, then cool off and enjoy the pool in the afternoon. Or, sleep in, and attend our afternoon session from 1:30pm – 4:30pm. We’ll be at the Luxor Hotel in Egyptian Room E-F.
This is a great opportunity to learn, interact with your peers and ask all your burning questions about vRealize Operations. Space is limited so register today!
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By: Greg Hohertz, Blue Medora
In Part 1 and Part 2 of this blog, I discussed how you can monitor vCenter’s databases remotely using Blue Medora’s Management Pack for PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL. Monitoring database performance is important to understanding the performance and health of your vCenter server, but it is just as import to understand the performance and health of the vCenter server itself. In this blog, we’ll take a look at vCenter specific metrics, best practices, and how you can monitor these with vRealize Operations Manager.
First, it is important to understand the best practices and to identify which performance metrics really matter when monitoring vCenter. For this, we will take a look at VMware’s Technical White Paper “VMware vCenter Server Performance and Best Practices.” This white paper addresses key performance indicators for vCenter health and performance, as well as capacity metrics to watch. We see that CPU, Memory, Disk I/O, Network Throughput, Network I/O, and Concurrency (number of vCenter operations run currently) are the key indicators for performance and capacity.
Figure 1: Monitoring vCenter Dashboard
Luckily, vRealize Operations provides most of the key metrics we need to monitor. Additionally, we can leverage vRealize Operations’ analytics to understand both the capacity and stress of our vCenter server. After selecting your vCenter server on this custom dashboard, a number of key widgets will give you insights into your vCenter server performance and capacity.
Figure 2: Health, Capacity, Stress
Down the left-hand column we have three indicators:
Figure 3: Alerts, Key Performance Indicators, and Inventory
Down the right column we have three widgets that display open alerts on the vCenter server, key performance indicators, and an inventory of resources managed by your vCenter server. Under Key Performance Indicators, CPU, Memory, Network Operations and Throughput are all displayed along with a 6-hour sparkline showing the historical values of these metrics. Next is an inventory of Virtual Machines and Hosts (both totals and online) as well as total Clusters managed by this vCenter instance.
By combining remote database monitoring using the Blue Medora database management packs and the out-of-the-box monitoring provided for the vCenter instance, we now have some insight into the performance and capacity of our vCenter server. Next step is to set up some symptoms and alerts to notify us when anomalies occur relative to capacity or performance.
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VMware and Blue Medora are announcing the launch of the Blue Medora True Visibility Suite (TVS) Management Packs bundles for vRealize Operations to be available on September 1st, 2016 in Standard, Advanced, Enterprise, and Management Connectors editions.
Data Center infrastructure and virtualization operations management just got progressively better with a new and greatly enhanced offering from VMware and Blue Medora with the introduction of the Blue Medora TVS for vRealize Operations, management pack bundles. Blue Medora TVS extends VMware vRealize Operations to the broader heterogeneous data center and multi-cloud environments to give our users true analytical and enterprise-wide unified visibility.
These bundles offer a convenient, applicable, and flexible way for vRealize Operations customers to extend operations management, monitoring, and analytics far beyond vSphere to include multi-vendor infrastructure and applications. These extensions include servers, storage, networking, databases, and applications. Customers now have the option of picking the True Visibility Suite most applicable to their needs, and can use any or all of the management packs within the suite, without requiring individual licenses, or line item SKU’s to purchase. These options include the following:
The TVS bundles include the complete Blue Medora inventory of management packs. There are more than 30 such management packs in various bundles. All the Blue Medora TVS for vRealize Operations management pack bundles can be found on VMware’s Cloud Management Solution Exchange page.
Check out our new video recapping the Blue Medora True Visibility Suite for VMware vRealize Operations.
For more information:
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Did you ever wonder or faced the following questions from a customer regarding vRealize Operations Manager?
If your answer is yes to any of the above, then this blog is for you.
Before I go ahead and discuss the above questions, let’s cover some basics first.
Monitoring can be defined as observing the current behavior of any system to make sure that it runs as expected or well within the defined boundaries. We use this method in our everyday life in all possible areas. For this discussion, I am confining myself to only Datacenter monitoring and more specifically to Virtualized Datacenter.
From Datacenter perspective, monitoring means the process of using manual or automated tools and techniques to continuously observe the different components of Datacenter to make sure that the health of every one of them is in compliance with defined criteria’s.
Traditionally from Datacenter perspective we majorly monitor the following components:
In every datacenter we typically have Network Operations Center (NOC) and Security Operations Center (SOC) where we monitor network and security operations of an Organization. Traditionally we have a live display or Dashboard where we project and continuously monitor these environments.
We have solutions like Cacti, Nagios and players like BMC, CA etc. in this monitoring space.
With traditional Datacenter monitoring we were monitoring only the hardware, network, storage, Operating Systems and Applications. But virtualization changed the scenario. It introduced another major and vital component between Servers and the operating systems, which is THE HYPERVISOR. Thus with and without virtualization the troubleshooting and monitoring criteria changes significantly. Functionally the rest of the components remains same (Physical Server, Network, Storage and OS/Applications), but the way resource management is done in Virtualized environment is different from traditional one. Please NOTE, though I said everything is same it is actually not, with Software Defined Network and Storage it is different, but that is the subject of discussion for another time.
Let’s see how it is different in virtual environment. In traditional environment all the resources of a server is dedicated to the running operating system and in turn to the application/applications running inside that operating system (OS). Here, the operating system manages all the physical resources available in the underlying physical hardware.
In contrast, in virtualized server, the Hypervisor manages the resources for the virtual machines and thus the resources are shared by many different VM’s and in turn the OS and Applications running inside them. But the entire process is abstracted to the OS running inside the VM. It can see only the resources provided to it by the admin and thinks it has all the resources only for it’s use which is what actually allocated for it. This is not a fact. We are tricking the VM into thinking like this. It is more clear in the following picture.
Traditional vs Virtual Architecture
Also troubleshooting in virtualized environment is different because a resource crunch at the hypervisor layer may lead to performance problem in VM. For example, say a virtual machine is using only 50% of all the resources allocated to it, but since there is a storage latency at Hypervisor level, the VM may perform poorly. So now you have another critical layer to monitor for. Actually, I will go so far to say that in Virtualized Environment, Hypervisor perspective is THE MOST important perspective for maintaining performance in that environment.
For obvious reasons, traditional monitoring tools fail to understand or provide the insight required for monitoring a virtualized datacenter. We need more modern, specialized and sophisticated tools for that.
So, traditional tools and way of monitoring is not sufficient for this type of Datacenter.
Next question is what to monitor for? Once you are clear about what you need to monitor then we can decide which tool to use.
What parameters to monitor?
Here I am not going to discuss about physical server, Datacenter Network or Storage health, as that remains same (not considering Software Defined Storage or network). In this blog I am going to talk only about Operating Systems or Applications monitoring. In traditional environment we are content with monitoring different parameters and metrics for server utilization (typically CPU, Memory, Network and Storage). But as discussed above, in virtualized environment what an Operating System sees inside a virtual machine is not the entire picture. It is only part of the picture.
Note: From here onwards I will be more specific to VMware environment, but the general idea and discussion can be applied to any hypervisor environment. It’s just that VMware hypervisor is more sophisticated and has advanced many technologies for managing resources which is not present in other hypervisors.
As a virtualization admin I am more interested about the overall utilization of the physical server. If a VM is under resource constraint (for example, I have given it 4 GB RAM and it requires 6 GB) and I have enough free resources at the hypervisor level, then simply increasing the resources for that VM will solve the problem. But consider the following scenario.
The physical server has 64 GB physical RAM. If I keep aside 4 GB RAM for ESXi Hypervisor, that leaves us with 60 GB RAM.
Next, let’s assume I have deployed 50 VM’s with 3 GB vRAM each in that server. So the total allocation resource is 150 GB vRAM. I am over allocating by 90 GB. Till the time VM’s use less RAM and the overall current requirement stays below 60GB this environment runs fine with no issues. But if somehow all the VM’s starts using 50% of the vRAM allocated to each of them at the same time (you cannot say NO ) then your active RAM requirement is 75 GB which is greater than what the server has (60GB) and you run into performance problem.
You see, all your individual VM’s utilization is 50%, but overall you have severe performance issue.
It is evident that in virtual environment you should monitor not only for allocation or current utilization but also for DEMAND and should be more interested about the TREND than just the current Utilization.
Using normal monitoring tools, monitoring only the current utilization is not sufficient because in virtualized environment you typically over-provision resources (if not memory then always CPU) and you need to know the trend for the resource utilization so that you can predict the utilization as well. This leads to predicting the capacity as well. You need to know well in advance when you will be out of resources and need to procure more. This is particularly important for dynamic environments where the environment grows at a faster pace (service provider or private/public cloud environment).
Also when a problem occurs in a VM, you should be able to see the entire environment from a single page and co-relate between all the different parameters and understand the cause and effect and thus finding Root-Cause of a problem in the shortest time possible.
vRealize Operations Manager does all the above and more. It is not a traditional monitoring tool. It does not even monitor the parameters in real time. It collects the metrics in 5 minute interval and shows the data likewise. So in traditional sense you cannot call it a monitoring tool (in traditional sense a monitoring tool typically monitors the parameters continuously in real-time).
Though many will differ with me, but I prefer to call it an “Analytical and Forensic tool” rather than a simple monitoring tool. You can do monitoring with it, but it’s main beauty lies in the analytical and forensic capabilities. It is a Swiss knife for Datacenter monitoring and analytics.
This tool intimates you about a problem even before it arises. It warns you about the probable issues that may come in near and not so near future. It analyzes and tell you when you will be out of resources. You can run What-If scenarios (what if the utilization increases or a new project comes, when you will need to add more resources).
If any issue arises in your environment, then you can simply click on the notification and drill down to minute details to find out what caused the problem. Actually it automatically does a Root-Cause analysis and gives you probable solutions as well.
With the help of this tool I was able to find root cause of a critical issue in less than 10 minutes with all the evidence I needed, which the traditional infra teams cloud not find in 15 days (a story for a separate time).
It can show you reclamation values and you can initiate those tasks from this tool. You need to analyze which VM’s taking up most of the resources in the Datacenter? No worries. Same goes for any other parameters. You need to run other analytics on any of the entities? Here you go. Like the Forensic tools and methods you use to find out a security breach, you can apply similar approach to find the root cause of any problem in your datacenter through this tool. Provided below is a screenshot showing what actions you can do on VM’s from this tool.
Actions available on the VM’s
It is designed and built to do a lot many things and you should focus on those. If you only want to see the current CPU, Memory, Network, Storage utilization of the VM’s then why do you need this? Any 3rd party traditional monitoring tool can do that. If you want to transform your Datacenter into a modern Datacenter with every bit of it under your control where you already know what is happening and what is going to happen then this is for you.
So you see this is not your traditional monitoring tool. It is way more than that. It is up to you whether you want to use it only to see the current utilization and compare that parameter with other tools or utilize it fully to get the full benefits.
Get your expectations right, learn how to use it, how to interpret the values and this will be the best tool you can have.
A valid question, most often you see the memory utilization reported by OS or a reporting tool (for e.g, System Center for Microsoft Operating Systems) differ from that of vRealize Operations Manager. Why is that?
You see hypervisor has its own way of managing resources and it looks at the resources differently from that of a typical operating system. A typical operating system looks only at the memory that it is asking for. But hypervisor has different methods. For example, ESXi has four ways of physical memory management.
All of the above helps ESXi to safely give us the option to do over-provisioning of memory. So if a VM asks for new memory pages that does not always mean it is taking extra physical memory space. It may be possible some other VM has the same exact page and that page gets shared with this VM. So essentially this VM got a new page but from ESXi perspective no extra page or memory space is required to serve the request. More about these can be found here.
Hence a new memory request for a VM does not always mean a new memory page served by ESXi.
So from inside the operating system it may be reported that the utilization of that OS instance is 60%, but from vRealize Operations Manager it may report that the utilization of that VM is only 50%. Notice the difference, from inside the VM, OS reports the utilization of the OS, but from outside the VM, vRealize Operations Manager reports the VM utilization which may be different and in all probability will be less than the one reported from within.
Also when you talk about virtualization and memory management by Hypervisor, you need to know the following parameters and what they mean:
The above three parameters as reported in vRealize Operations Manager.
Capacity – Demand – Usage
Capacity (Allocation) means the amount of resources allocated to a VM. In the above picture the VM has a memory capacity of 1 GB. That means while creating the VM, 1 GB vRAM was allocated to it.
Demand, is the amount of resource demanded by the VM at any particular time. In the above picture the VM has a current demand of 84.48 MB.
Usage is the amount of resource provided by underlying hypervisor to the VM. In this case the Usage is 217.18 MB.
In a typical well performing environment Demand should always be less than Allocation and Usage.
If Demand is greater than Allocation, then you have a VM which is undersized. You need to increase resources for that VM.
If Demand is greater than Usage, then you have resource crunch/contention at hypervisor level and you should either increase resources at hypervisor level or decrease number of VM’s running on that hypervisor.
The guest of the VM or generic monitoring tools typically reports capacity and usage parameters.
In the above screenshot you can see considerably higher Usage shown in vRealize Operations Manager whereas Demand is pretty less. This is because, if there is no contention then the amount of memory assigned to a VM is not reclaimed, irrespective of whether the memory pages are active or not. In simple terms, in this case the VM once touched 217.18 MB of it’s allocated 1 GB RAM, since then the Usage is shown as 217.18 MB. Though the current demand (utilization) is 1 GB, but since the memory space was allocated by ESXi server, it is reported as current Usage. If the ESXi host is under resource contention then memory is reclaimed and the Usage goes down.
Since vRealize Operations Manager is an agentless solution and it does not collect generic utilization parameters inside the guest OS, so it has no way of knowing the utilization from Guest OS perspective. The Usage it reports is from Hypervisor perspective. Which is completely different from OS perspective? As explained above a memory requirement from Guest OS perspective does not always covert to a memory requirement from ESXi perspective. This is the reason most of the times you will see that Guest OS or other monitoring tools report higher utilization whereas vRealize Operations Manager reports lower utilization.
When calculating current Capacity or future requirement or suggesting reclamation values vRealize Operations Manager considers Demand and is aggressive in nature. This is the reason you find discrepancy in these values reported in traditional against that of vRealize Operations Manager.
Also note, when deciding whether a VM is idle or over-worked vRealize Operations Manager checks for certain parameters which is set in Policies. The policy is set in the following way:
If a VM’s CPU or Memory utilization is less than 10% for more than 90% of time, then the VM is considered as an idle VM.
Similarly, if a VM’s CPU or Memory utilization is more than 90% for more than 90% of time, then the VM is considered as an overworked VM.
The above values are examples and you can customize the percentage of time and utilization.
What this essentially means is, say in a week if a VM is 10% utilized for 90% of the times then this VM is idle. So essentially, if that VM is 90% utilized for less than 10% of time which is upto 16.8 hours within a week, still it is considered an idle VM. Your typical tool will report the 90% utilization but vRealize Operations Manager will say it is oversized and idle VM. So if the VM had 4 GB RAM, vRealize Operations Manager may recommend for 1 GB. Now if you reduce the RAM to 1 GB then the VM will face severe problem during those 16.8 hours when it requires 3.6 GB of vRAM.
I have faced this question multiple times, why only Health badge for a VM is shown in vRealize Automation when you integrate it with vRealize Operations Manager. People expect and want to see realtime CPU and Memory utilization for the workloads.
Please understand what you are asking for is a very nominal thing. What this tool is providing is way beyond that. Knowing only utilization, you need to monitor it, make the decision for yourself. While making that decision at a glance you never know whether it is a intermittent spike or long standing issue. What is the final aim here? To run the application in a healthy state, right? Should you be bothered about the utilization, when the tool is taking care of all of that? It knows what the VM wants and requires and tell you whether it is HEALTHY or not. Whether the spike is well within range or a recurring issue. This is what you should be bothered about. About the state of the VM. This is what you actually want to know and this is what exactly what it shows.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, I can say the following:
To know more about this great product please visit the documentation area. Also check the great training available from VMware Education.
Following are the main reasons for which I use this tool:
Do let me know which features of this product you use. How it helps in making your life easy.
The post vRealize Operations Manager – Monitoring vs Forensic appeared first on VMware Cloud Management.
The leading industry log management solution, vRealize Log Insight just got better with 4.0, launching later this year. Sign up here to be notified when it’s released. Log Insight 4.0 has a new, improved and re-designed user interface, offers enhanced alert management functionalities, and is natively built for and works seamlessly with vSphere, vRealize, and other VMware products.
VMware vRealize Log Insight delivers Intelligent Log Management for infrastructure and applications across physical, virtual, and cloud environments. Log Insight enables administrators to connect to everything in their environment, e.g., OS, apps, storage, network devices, providing a single location to collect, store, and analyze logs at scale. vRealize Log Insight 4.0 is coming and includes the following new features and much more.
Log Insight 4.0 New Features Include:
| New Server Capabilities
· New Clarity UI · vSphere 6.5 compatibility · New Admin Alerts Management UI · Octet-framing over TCP · Public Installer APIs
|
New General UI Items
· DeviceID to name Aliasing · New “field does not exist” filter · New gauge chart · New “blur” on session timeout
|
New Look – Clarity UI
The new vRealize Log Insight user interface uses a new, cleaner design based on the Clarity standard. Updated features include a new skin, a replacement of checkboxes by toggle switches, new Does Not Exist filter used to find events that do not contain some specified field, a new Gauge Chart visual display tool, and many more awesome new features.
New Admin Alert Management
A new Admin Alert Management tool and UI allows for a single interface to view and manage alerts. This includes the ability to share alerts and view historical alerts across time. Additional alert capabilities include a new system notification for when Event Forwarder drops are detected, an updated Event Type alert that now supports a time range, and a new ability for users to subscribe to content pack alerts that allows for automated upgrading inline with the associated content packs.
New Gauge Chart
vRealize Log Insight 4.0 introduces a new Gauge Chart display visual tool. The new Gauge Chart allows users to quickly display aggregate log data into a speedometer like view to meter and measure the general status of systems and/or applications being monitored. The Gauge Chart is color-coded in red, yellow or green to provide additional performance context intuitively.
vRealize Log Insight comes with built-in knowledge and native support of vSphere and other VMware products, like VMware Horizon with View, vRealize Operations and vRealize Automation. Log Insight 4.0 is fully compatible with the new vSphere 6.5 release and will be able to start collecting and managing VMware logs intelligently from the get-go.
vRealize Intelligent Operations: Better together
Log Insight integrates with vRealize Operations to bring unstructured and structured data together, for significantly enhanced end-to-end operations management. To gain the benefits of intelligent operations management for your entire data center, consider vRealize Operations (which provides strong integration with vRealize Log Insight). Get a free trial now.
To find out more about Log Insight, visit our Log Insight page.
The post New vRealize Log Insight 4.0 release appeared first on VMware Cloud Management.
On behalf of VMware I am pleased to announce VMware vRealize Log Insight 4.0.0, the Intelligent Log Management solution for Infrastructure and Applications, is now GA and live on www.vmware.com.
You can download it now.
What’s New?
For more information on what specific features that are being released for vRealize Log Insight 4.0 please visit our previous Blog post describing product release in detail here: http://blogs.vmware.com/management/2016/10/vrealize-log-insight-4-0.html
Got questions? Leave a comment below.
The post vRealize Log Insight 4.0 just launched! appeared first on VMware Cloud Management.
Read on to learn more about vRealize Log Insight 4.0 !
Let’s begin with some …
New overall User Interface based on the VMware Clarity standard
Clarity is an open source design that combines UX guidelines, an HTML/CSS framework components. Clarity is meant for use by both designers and developers. For more information on the Clarity standard refer here.
Moving on to some …
Lots of other general enhancements that have been much asked for from the user community have been addressed in Log Insight 4.0 … we are listening. Some of which are:
In vRealize Log Insight v 4.0 you will also see a Blur on session timeout –
System Notifications:
Event forwarder events dropped notification
We already told you about User alerts that can now be created to alert based on new event types in vRLI 3.6, but in vRealize Log Insight v4.0 we take it step further.
In vRealize Log Insght 4.0 Users can subscribe to content pack alerts that allow automated updates inline with the associated content pack.
Another interesting feature introduced is the ability to Selectively disable system notifications with regular expressions.
There will be no system notifications during upgrade in vRLI 4.0 , so no need to use above feature to disable notifications during upgrade!
In vRLI v4.0 we have added a New filter called Does Not Exist to find events that do not contain some specified field.
Some of the new agent features available in vRLI v4.0 are :
Another interesting feature is vRLI v4.0 compatibility with vSphere v6.5
vSphere Content pack updates include
Additional little tidbits of information about alert management:
Syslog octet-framing over TCP:
256 <38>1 2016-09-07T09:02:50+02:00 localhost prg00000 1234 – [mdc@16700 category=”Log” component=”loggen” logType=”Log” sourceType=”Platform” tag=”test123″] seq: 0000000000, thread: 0000, runid: 1473256970, stamp: 2016-09-07T09:02:50 PADDPADDPADDPADDPADDP
2016-09-07T09:02:50+02:00 localhost prg00000 1234 – [mdc@16700 category=”Log” component=”loggen” logType=”Log” sourceType=”Platform” tag=”test123″] seq: 0000000000, thread: 0000, runid: 1473256970, stamp: 2016-09-07T09:02:50 PADDPADDPADDPADDPADDP
Supported deployment APIs
We have added an attractive visualization for single values, where the user can decide what is “green”, “yellow” or “red”.
Typical application would be representation of CPU utilization, memory utilization on charts …
The user can change the ranges, however
The chart can be saved to the dashboard and the user can change the ranges and the chart type there as well …
Note: Tech Preview features are disabled by default, come with no support, and may be changed or removed in a future release.
Some Use Cases we try to address are:
Agents can be configured to run script and collect output allowing for addition collection sources as well as data massaging.
Configuration details to make scripted input work:
Authentication via vIDM can be configured allowing for Single Sign-On.
Enable vIDM integration from Administration \General page UI and save.
Then go to https://li /admin/auth or access it from UI’s top right corner – Administration -> Authentication. There you’ll see AD and vIDM configuration page, so you can input your AD and/or vIDM related info and save.
To be able to login via vIDM user you should import group or user from Administration -> Access Control page.
Limitations:
Some Useful links:
Got questions? Leave a comment below.
The post What’s new in vRealize Log Insight 4.0: An in-depth review appeared first on VMware Cloud Management.
Resource contention is one of the most critical issues in any virtualized environment. When contention occurs, applications slow down and your users are affected. Up until now two different methodologies have been employed to mitigate the risk of contention, with varied results. But now I want to introduce you to the new “game changing” method available from VMware: Predictive DRS! But first a bit of a history lesson on the original two methods.
The first of these is the Reactive Method which focuses on resolving unexpected resource demand. The most widely used example of a reactive solution is VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler, or DRS. As the day progresses, workloads may need more resources, which can lead to contention on the host. The reactive method moves VMs around to ensure all workloads get the resources they need and applications remain healthy. Note this method needs only a minimal amount of VMs to be moved in order to be effective, which means minimal overhead. The reactive method only moves VMs when contention approaches, so it’s possible (however remote) for users to feel some effects of the contention before it’s resolved.
The next approach, the Balanced Method, has become more popular recently. This method focuses on balancing workloads across hosts and clusters to mitigate the risk of growing workloads. This can be an effective way to avoid hot spots by spreading workloads out evenly. However, the constant movement of VMs every day means the potential for overhead is huge. There is also no guarantee that a balanced environment will avoid all contention, so the Reactive Method is still needed here. VMware DRS can be configured to use the Balanced Method and, together with vRealize Operations, can balance workloads both within and across clusters in your environment. DRS and vR Ops allow you to set the amount of balance you are trying to drive, thus allowing you to control how much overhead you are willing to tolerate to obtain that balance. In vSphere 6.5, an additional policy is exposed in the DRS configuration screen that provides the option to choose balance based on number of VMs rather than load (although in cases of extreme resource contention, the VM number might become uneven in order to keep workloads happy). It’s important to note this method is very popular among a lot of niche vendor products. They may give it a fancy name to make it seem like it is doing something more, but in the end it falls into the balance bucket.
The newest approach is the Predictive Method, currently offered only through VMware‘s new Predictive DRS option. Predictive DRS using a combination of DRS and vRealize Operations Manager to predict future demand and determine when and where hot spots will occur. When future hot spots are found, Predictive DRS moves the workloads long before any contention can occur. Even better, this means with the Predictive Method only the required workloads are moved, resulting in minimal overhead.
So how does Predictive DRS work? It starts by leveraging the Dynamic Thresholds of vRealize Operations (one of the core functions of vRealize Operations), which understand the behaviors of all workloads throughout the day. vRealize Operations collects hundreds of metrics across numerous types of objects (Hosts, Datastores, VMs, etc) every day. Each night it runs its Dynamic Threshold calculations which uses sophisticated analytics to create a band of what is “normal” for each metric/object combination. The band has an upper and lower bound of normal for each metric associated with object. So for example if we have a simple app server VM, it will show the VM does not use a lot of CPU early in the morning. But at 8am when people start logging into the system, the CPU load will spike very high. It will then taper off around noon as people go to lunch, and then back up again for the rest of the day until people go home. And don’t forget about the nightly reports which run at 2AM and spike CPU.
The great thing about Dynamic Thresholds is that they are tailored to each individual VM and application. There is nothing you need to do; the analytical engine in vRealize Operations takes care of everything.
Once vRealize Operations has calculated its Dynamic Thresholds we have 3 fundamental data points:
Once we have those we can ask the most important contention mitigation question of all, “Will any of my hosts struggle to serve my workloads today”? If the answer is “Yes” then let’s move a few VMs around to avoid that future contentious situation. That’s Predictive DRS in a nutshell!
So Predictive DRS is a game changer, but in a complex datacenter like yours, all three risk mitigation methods are required to fully manage contention. Fortunately, VMware DRS and vRealize Operations offer all three, in one cohesive solution.
You do not have to settle for one or the other and most importantly you are in control with vRealize Operations and VMware DRS. For more information on the latest vRealize Operations release please read the vRealize Operations 6.4 blog.
The post Predictive DRS appeared first on VMware Cloud Management.
As you may recall, in the first Predictive DRS management blog post we discussed the three different methodologies that can be deployed to avoid contention, the value of each of them brings to the table and why its important to deploy all three in your datacenter. In this blog and in the video below will focus on a Predictive DRS walk through showing how simple it is to configure the Predictive DRS feature in both vRealize Operations 6.4 and vSphere 6.5. This walk through will also serve as a great demonstration of the solution and give you a view into how it all comes together. After watching the video you should be easily able to configure it in your environment and start seeing the benefits of Predictive DRS.
So as you can see Predictive DRS is a game changer but you will need all three risk mitigation methods are required to fully manage contention. Fortunately, VMware DRS and vRealize Operations offer all three, in one cohesive solution.
You do not have to settle for one or the other and most importantly you are in control with vRealize Operations and VMware DRS. For more information on the latest vRealize Operations release please read the vRealize Operations 6.4 blog.
The post Predictive DRS Walk Through appeared first on VMware Cloud Management.
Automation tools meant to facilitate application management may get you more—or less—than you bargained for, particularly as your organization matures along its software-defined journey. Underlying approaches to automation vary widely and not just because, obviously, different vendor’s solutions differ. There’s that, of course, and you already know that even two relatively ‘apples to apples’ solutions can perform differently in the same production environment for any number of reasons. But there’s more: using third party automation tools may introduce a level of risk into your application management architecture that wouldn’t otherwise exist. Worse: sometimes the downside takes a while to understand, by which time you could have a problem on your hands worse than the one the tool was purchased to solve!
How can this be? To understand it fully, and thereby keep the decision-making power in your hands where it belongs, requires a shift in the minds of some IT practitioners: it takes an application-centric approach. Applications do not perform exactly the same in any two production environments. In today’s highly dynamic virtualized and cloud environments, workloads are moving across clouds and back again and may perform differently as they do so. Many third party tools follow narrow rules and use static metrics that could incorrectly deem something a problem when it’s a “normal” anomaly for that application in that setting. For instance, a tool may alert you to excessive activity but the “automated fix” actually causes downtime elsewhere. IT managers need an understanding of the solution’s underlying philosophy.
This approach can result in capacity miscalculations through an overweighting of the value of “rightsizing.” Many tools lack a holistic view of the enterprise, delivering only limited static metrics and unable to accurately diagnose overall system health. Niche solutions may be adequate for limited server virtualization, but won’t scale out with the sophistication you need. Customers are surprised to discover they need to augment missing capabilities with other vendor’s products in order to retrofit essential functionality. That correction can lead to duplication in other functionalities, resulting in inefficiency and negation of anticipated cost savings – e.g. excessive movement of workloads can result in high overhead, and thus the value gained is negligible. The screenshot below illustrates how VMware vRealize Log Insight can give users a “behind the scenes” look at how a 3rd party automation tool can potentially negatively impact your environment.
As your enterprise extends into the cloud, third party tools vetted for simpler times may not effectively make the journey with you, so, at a minimum, you take on the onus of continual re-evaluation of your tools that may not be worth the energy saved by using them.
A fully virtualized stack, with storage, networking, and compute, is simply more complicated than just server virtualization. Third party tools may work well as you scale up, but as you scale out to tens of thousands of VM’s, the only way to have high levels of certainty for your business-critical applications is with an automated control plane that’s natively integrated with the stack. Moreover, tapping the full benefit of that virtualized stack—taking it to a hybrid cloud environment for breakaway efficiency and agility—requires a sophisticated control plane to orchestrate your highly dynamic virtualized and cloud environment.
Simply put, it’s about decision support. Some vendor’s approach to “automation” is to relieve you of the “headache” of knowing what’s going on in your environment. So, for example, a tool may identify a VM server whose health is degrading and move the workload—but it fails to fix the server. Again, this may not be problematic in one data center with a few hundred VMs, but scale out to tens of thousands, and you’ve introduced the risk that comes from having rules in place that may not bubble up problems like downed VMs while they’re still simple to fix.
To realize the vision of the self-healing data center requires a management control plane that delivers accurate and actionable data. A policy-based approach, rather than a rules-based approach, can more properly discern what data is critical to deliver to you. An integrated approach to operations management ensures application uptime by learning your environment’s particular needs. Optimal management in the era of the modern data center and cloud requires an approach based on learning and correlating the right metrics based on application behavior in order to identify the most actionable data. Competitive approaches tend to treat all resources equally, as commodities in your ecosystem, and deal with situations according to a basic set of rules, with no intelligence—just a straightforward “when A happens, do B” approach. This fails in a fully virtualized and cloud environment. Practitioners in this environment need advice on how best to remediate problems based on a holistic view. A policy-based unified management console can point out configuration issues, performance bottlenecks and opportunities to rightsize over provisioned capacity—in other words, not just move a workload when there’s a problem (it can do that too!), but continually monitor your dynamic environment and adapt accordingly. Tracking anomalies in a system of self-learning behavioral analytics rapidly drives time to benefit, helping not only to keep your apps safe and productive but supporting accurate capacity planning.
As discussed in an independent research report from the University of Waterloo, integrated OS and application monitoring drive the intelligent workload management needed to make the self-healing data center a reality. The intelligent operations and automation provided by vRealize Operations, coupled with VMware Predictive DRS, allows you to get more out of vSphere, and SDDC environment, with easy to use capacity management and performance monitoring. Using self-learning analytics, an integrated management console can guide remediation with recommended corrective actions and automatically reclaim over provisioned capacity for optimal resource utilization.
The Tenaja report includes cloud automation, cloud operations and cloud business/financial management. Key takeaways from this study:
Legend: VMW=VMware, MSFT=Microsoft, SVN=ServiceNow, HPE=HP Enterprise, CSCO=Cisco, RH= RedHat, SPL=Splunk, VMT=VMTurbo
Source: Taneja Group, 2016
The software-defined journey is about more than IT; it’s an approach to modern business, one that’s increasingly necessary to deliver the kind of customer experiences needed to stay competitive. The application has become more and more central to your customer’s experience with your brand, and the underlying infrastructure that delivers that experience is best managed by a unified management console that becomes intimate with applications, no matter where they reside.
The post Automating Virtualization & Cloud Management: Realizing Upsides Can Mean Uncalculated Risk appeared first on VMware Cloud Management.
Have you deployed or are considering vSAN for your vSphere 6.0U2 or 6.5 environment? If so, you should know about VMware’s new VMware vRealize Operations Management Pack for vSAN 1.0 released last week. The vSAN management pack is specifically designed to accelerate time to production with vSAN, optimize application performance for workloads running on vSAN and provide unified management for the Software Defined Datacenter (SDDC).
With over 5,500 customers, vSAN is a proven technology transforming the storage market and enabling customers to modernize their datacenter. vSAN is applicable for many use cases including business critical applications, remote or branch offices, virtual desktop infrastructure, business continuity and more. Many customers start with a subset of these use cases and over time develop trust in vSAN for almost all their use cases. With the vSAN management pack, you can gain insights about the impact of vSAN in your infrastructure quickly, and bring your business greater efficiency in a shorter amount of time. This can be helpful to showcase the impact of vSAN and evaluate it, not only for the use cases you have in mind today but as you expand into the future. With the vSAN management pack, you can gain confidence quickly with vSAN while avoiding the risks and blind spots.
For example, as you migrate workloads onto vSAN, the management pack provides historical performance for key storage performance indicators as well as trending future demand. With this information, you can easily confirm that your applications are healthy and happy running on vSAN. After all, we know the newest technology is the first suspect. Having “proof of innocence” with the vSAN management pack’s vSAN Optimization Dashboard provides the confidence you need. It answers important questions during the initial stages of evaluating and deploying vSAN:
Deploy vRealize Operations with the vSAN management pack to accelerate your time to value and begin enjoying the benefits of software defined storage.
It can be challenging to strike a balance between the demands of your business and the cost of delivering IT services. You are probably looking to vSAN to help solve this problem, drive better efficiency out of IT spend and increase critical application performance and availability. By leveraging the vSAN management pack, you can be assured that the goals you set for vSAN are being met. You can also look for other opportunities to squeeze cost out of your data center. And with vSAN management pack, planning for growth and expansion will be quick and easy.
As the lines between efficiency and performance get closer, the buffer zone for troubleshooting and finding problem root cause gets smaller. Storage issues can be very painful and it is better to stay ahead of those issues than to wait until they manifest as application outages. Having vRealize Operations with the vSAN management pack allows you to deliver the most out of your vSAN environment with:
Add the power of vRealize Operations’ proven performance analytics to get the most out of your vSAN investment.
Cloud economics means abstraction with transparency. You must be able to manage both on premises and public clouds from the same platform. VMware’s cloud management platform gives customers a complete, 360 degree view of infrastructure, virtualization, applications and services through vRealize Operations Manager.
If you already have vRealize Operations, download and install the Management Pack for vSAN from VMware Solution Exchange. There’s no cost and customers who own any edition of vR Ops are entitled to install and use this solution.
Not a vR Ops customer? No problem! VMware provides an evaluation program so that you can try it out in your environment with all features enabled – you can even install the Management Pack for vSAN once your trial copy is installed.
The post Announcing the vSAN Management Pack for vRealize Operations appeared first on VMware Cloud Management.
In the previous post, I explained how vRealize Operations with vRealize Orchestrator can automate alert notifications via the REST Notification plugin to enable a self-healing datacenter. I also introduced the Webhook Shims as the solution that provides the underlying capability. In this post, I will walk you through installing the Webhook Shims in your environment and setting up a simple use case to test things out.
For example, you probably know that vRealize Operations can monitor services on a supported OS through Endpoint Operations. If that service becomes unavailable, vRealize Operations can alert you. But wouldn’t it be nice if vRealize Operations attempted to restart the service first? Why bother an administrator for such a simple task? If it still doesn’t respond after an automated restart attempt, then you may want a human to take a look.
Let’s begin with installation of the Webhook Shims. For this you will need an environment capable of running Python 2.7 (the language used to build the shim). If you already have a Python 2.7 environment with virtualenv installed, you can skip over the next section.
Also, there are some modules in the Webhook Shim that don’t play well with Windows, so I strongly recommend a Linux OS here.
To keep things simple, I’ll use a virtual machine created with the Photon OS OVA (as it already comes pre-loaded with Python 2.7). Once you have the Photon OVA deployed, you can open an SSH session and log in with root and the password changeme (which will prompt you for a password change).
The first thing we need to do is install wget. Enter the command
tdnf install wget -y
Now we can use wget for the next step, installing pip and virtualenv for Python. First, grab the pip installation script with wget
wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py
Now you can install pip using the script we just downloaded. What is pip? It is a package manager for Python, sort of like how yum is for Linux (or in the case of our little Photon OS, tdnf).
python get-pip.py
Finally, you are ready to install virtualenv using pip. By the way, virtualenv is not a requirement, it just is a good practice to avoid contaminating your nice clean Python install with modules that are unique to a given environment or may require different module versions. Anyway, install virtualenv
pip install virtualenv
Congratulations! Prerequisites are complete and we can get busy installing the shim.
Now that we have our environment ready, let’s begin the Webhook Shims install. For this, we’ll use git to pull the repository down, so we will need to install that first.
tdnf install git -y
Great. Now we can clone the Webhook Shims repository from github.
git clone https://github.com/vmw-loginsight/webhook-shims.git
Using a git repository allows you to update the Webhook Shims easily whenever a change is made (i.e. fixes or enhancements) to the main branch.
At this point, we can create the virtual environment for Python, using virtualenv. As the readme on the Webhook Shims repository github page suggests, we will use venv-webhookshims. We will create this environment in the repository directory.
cd webhook-shims
virtualenv venv-webhookshims
Now you will see why we are using a Python virtual environment. The Webhook Shims has some modules that are required that are not included in the default Python library. We will need to install those into the virtual environment we just created. First, we will activate the virtual environment and then install the prerequisites. This is easier than you might think, because the repository contains a file with a list of the prerequisites so we just have to reference that file with pip.
First, activate the virtual environment.
source venv-webhookshims/bin/activate
Notice the prompt changes to let us know we are in a virtual environment. The OS will function as it normally does, the only difference is that the Python library will include any modules we add while in the virtual environment. By the way, to exit the virtual environment, simply enter deactivate at any time.
Installing the prerequisites, as I mentioned, is easy. There is a file in the repo named requirements.txt that contains all the modules needed to run the Webhook Shims. Using pip we can simply reference that file to install them.
pip install -r requirements.txt
Now that was easy! At this point you have installed the shims and are ready for the next step – configuring and running the Webhook Shims. I will cover that in the next blog post.
The post The Self-Healing Data Center (Part 2) – Installing the Webhook Shims for Automating Alerts appeared first on VMware Cloud Management.
VMware IT uses many VMware tools in their IT organization to manage their private cloud. One of these useful tools is vRealize Network Insight.
What is vRealize Network Insight?
VMware vRealize® Network Insight™ delivers intelligent operations for software-defined networking and security. It helps optimize network performance and availability with converged visibility across virtual and physical networks, provides planning and recommendations for implementing micro-segmentation based security, and provides operational views to quickly and confidently manage and scale VMware NSX® deployment.
There are 2 use cases of VRealize Network Insight deployment in VMware IT featured in the video below.
Watch the vRealize Network Insight dogfooding video here:
The vRealize Network Insight video featured below has Swapnil S. Hendre talking about how we are using vRealize Network Insight for Micro-Segmentation in VMware’s production infrastructure and John Tompkins who talks about how we are using vRNI to manage one of the largest VMware clouds of its kind, stretching across 6 data centers with more than 200,000 VMs on more than 2,000 hosts.
It’s all about getting the full potential from NSX and micro-segmentation. To get the most out of NSX, we knew we needed to improve our process to identify unique traffic flows, or what you might call the micro-segmentation planning process. At VMware, that’s part of what we call the application discovery process. It was a manual process and very time consuming, so it was delaying our micro-segmentation deployment.”
Speeding up their NSX deployment time was a big goal.
Adds Hendre “Network Insight provides East-West traffic analytics support right out of the box, so it made our planning process very efficient. we now have better control and tracking of our virtual distributed firewalls. That’s a huge help when it comes to meeting audit and compliance requirements.
We also have faster, intuitive insight into problems that our general support staff can understand, so we don’t have to run-up all issues to our networking experts. We can also create point-in-time dashboards and share them among teams in alert notifications, so everyone gets a good snapshot of the issue.”
John Tompkins adds “Network Insight, like the name suggests, really opens your eyes. Now we can identify issues with our NSX deployments that we hadn’t been aware of. We have visibility into things that what would have been black holes in the past. That lets us move forward with confidence.
Check out these links:
David Davis on vRealize Operations – Post #33 – What is vRealize Network Insight (vRNI) ?
VMware on VMware: http://www.vmware.com/company/vmware-on-vmware.html
February 15th: Getting More Out of VMware with vRealize Network Insight
The post VMware on VMware: vRealize Network Insight appeared first on VMware Cloud Management.
In 2016 VMware made big news with our Predictive DRS (pDRS) announcement and analysts and customers have been buzzing about it ever since. Predictive DRS is a game changer and helps you in the fight against resource contention. As you know, when contention occurs, applications slow down and your users are affected. Successfully mitigating resource contention is one of the most critical issues faced by any administrator of a virtualized environment.
The newest release of vRealize Operations 6.5 improves pDRS by allowing it to scale for ANY environment. Previously we recommended running pDRS on clusters with under 4,000 VMs. That “limitation” has been removed, so pDRS can now be used in your largest clusters.
I get really animated when I tell the Predictive DRS story. I love the simplicity of it all. How the two previous resource contention methodologies (Reactive and Balance) have their pros and cons. How they are augmented by the new Predictive method. How together these three methodologies provide a safety net for your workloads, ensuring they get the resources they need.
I think this new video explains it best: VMware Predictive Distributed Resource Scheduler
In a complex datacenter, all three risk mitigation methods are required to fully manage contention. VMware DRS and vRealize Operations offer you all three, in cohesive one solution.
For a more in-depth look at how DRS & pDRS function, I recommend these blog posts.
https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2015/05/drs-keeps-vms-happy.html
https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2016/05/load-balancing-vsphere-clusters-with-drs.html
https://blogs.vmware.com/management/2016/11/predictive-drs.html
https://blogs.vmware.com/management/2017/02/setting-record-straight-drs-pdrs-workload-placement.html
The post Predictive DRS Made Simple appeared first on VMware Cloud Management.
How VMware IT Leverages vRealize Network Insight