<\/p>\n
The first step is assumed, as vRealize Operations has always been a great control plane for your on-premises clusters, and it continues to be one of the best investments for stretching your data center and verifying that it has no wasted resources for the solutions running. However, steps 2 and 3 are a big leap. App awareness in vRealize Operations (vROPS) requires installing the solution via licensing (only available for enterprise licenses), then installing management packs that are necessary for the integration, and finally installing a proprietary agent. I\u2019m not a big fan of this, as other app-aware solutions can be installed easier and faster. On top of this, the public cloud in vROPS is available, but not enjoyable. These issues led VMware to create a new model for their strategy, which ended up being the VMware Cloud Operating Model.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n vRealize Operations 8.6 and cloud <\/strong><\/p>\n Let\u2019s get this out of the way:<\/p>\n The new UI for vROPS looks great and animates extremely well. As demonstrated to us, the new UI was slick and felt easier to understand. Instead of too many letters on the page, the UI is compiled and compact so that it\u2019s more intuitive to navigate when you\u2019re searching for a particular solution. This may just be my personal issue, but I love this new UI. I always had a problem with the old one. It just seemed like VMware wanted to put as much in front of you as possible, instead of creating an elegant experience that helps you utilize the solution on a day-to-day use-case basis. Now, for instance, added functionality lets you easily pin a dashboard to a location, and that\u2019s a nice feature, as the steps had not been intuitive before.<\/p>\n vROPS also has a new ability to configure your email payload templates. This allows you to configure the notification for errors, to dictate what happened, when it happened, and what actions should be taken. It\u2019s awesome to have these solutions altogether, especially as I\u2019ve had to deal with 3:00 a.m. calls when something happens, and I didn\u2019t know what to do to fix the issue.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Let\u2019s talk about Applications. As a reminder, the only way to utilize application-monitoring previously was by an enablement of the vROPS appliance, then enabling of management packs, then installing a proprietary app on the workload machines, and then configuring the monitoring configuration. This works well, but it\u2019s a bit tedious to get up and running. Now vROPs is bringing integration on-premises and in the cloud to connect with Dynatrace, App Dynamics, DataDog, or NewRelic to utilize their application-monitoring and push that data to vROPs.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Let\u2019s say that you don\u2019t have any of these solutions installed in your environment and you really wanted vROPs to perform this for you. Well, VMware has moved from the proprietary agent and embraced open-source solutions. \u2014vROPS now uses the Telegraf agent to push the data for your application to the appliance.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n With vROPS, the statement \u201cDo more with less\u201d is paramount. A key feature ensures that you are truly getting the most out of your data center. This means, for instance, that idle workloads that are just existing and using resources in your environment (not performing) will be targeted as machines that need to be removed.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n A critical component in every business is certification. (Even writing that sentence makes me vocally sigh.) We\u2019ve seen scenarios where critical applications crash because of old certifications \u2014 whether in small-business settings or in public-cloud SaaS solutions. This is a universal problem, and vROPs is now going to start monitoring your certificates.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Finally, let\u2019s talk about cost. One of vROP\u2019s superpowers is their ability to show the cost of the private data center and how Operations could \u201cshow-back\u201d that cost to development and leadership. This is normally an operation to show the use of these organizations. I even had a CTO who wanted to prove his infrastructure team worked so hard and were such a bargain that they cost the company nothing, because of how valuable the infrastructure was.<\/p>\n Currently, vROPs shows the total cost of ownership (TCO) of their private cloud. Soon they will expand to the public cloud \u2014 both native and VMware SDDCs. This cost ties in with vROPs based in solutions, which will be used to reduce the TCO and keep costs low. This is great integration that extends into the public cloud.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Speaking of the public cloud \u2014 it merits mentioning that it has not been forgotten by VMware. In fact, they have added more integration with public cloud-native services that will be used for troubleshooting purposes, as well as those TCO costs for the customer.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n There is so much more to dig into for vROPs. A picture is worth a thousand words though, so here is what they are looking at adding:<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/sterling.com\/stargazer\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/image001-1.png\")
<\/a>This briefing started on an interesting foot. Instead of just diving into new things or the overall picture of what they were going to cover, VMware wanted us to understand what their goals are for vRealize Suite. It\u2019s a simple three-step process: become the best control plane for VMware cloud, manage public-cloud resources, become app-aware and utilize AI\/ML to be intelligent.<\/p>\n<\/a>The goal here is to transform the old styles of operations, service delivery, and governance to be more automated, more agile, and more \u2014 dare I say it \u2014 cloud-like<\/em>. This is really a direction I can get behind for the suite, as this is a critical component with all the changes VMware has been doing. Sure, I can set up a Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) in Azure, GCP, and AWS, but that just gives me more VMware solutions to manage, without having to manage the underlying physical components. Moving this versatility to the VMware solution, as well as native cloud, is a good move: every SDDC that\u2019s in the public cloud has access to those native resources.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>It\u2019s worth mentioning that the configuration between vROPS and vRealize Automation (vRA) is being worked on to function more in-line. Currently, an alert can be used to call to an orchestrator workflow, and that will automatically fix the issue. I\u2019m assuming that this new configuration is to also add vRA Action Based Extensibility (ABX) to this as well, which isn\u2019t that big of a change. Visibility to understand what information is passed from vROPS to vRO would be great, as this allows you to know exactly how to configure the alert and then pass the needed information to the workflow.<\/p>\n<\/a>These are great solutions that can be used for your workloads both in the cloud and on-premises, which may be why more than one can be activated at a time. I know from experience that DataDog is a very cost-effective solution in AWS, so if you were utilizing multiple APM solutions, then vROPs could be your one-stop shop to see all the data and alert on that monitoring. With these solutions, you can also view the infrastructure and the application themselves, giving you insight into multiple layers.<\/p>\n<\/a>This is awesome, as Telegraf allows you to configure the agent to perform specific tasks that will be utilized for the application itself. Also, Telegraf has an extensive repository of these plugin configurations so you can basically copy and paste them into the configuration file of the agent. You can see a list of these configurations here: https:\/\/docs.influxdata.com\/telegraf\/v1.20\/plugins\/<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>The sustainability dashboard is awesome because most of the time this is a now-idle machine built for a project that has ended, and the notification to remove the infrastructure was never sent. It\u2019s amazing how often these are missed by enterprise environments, and this is a key function \u2014 especially during our global chip shortage. VMworld may be extremely interesting. VMware isn\u2019t trying to get you to purchase more hardware but instead, use the hardware you have to the full extent that it can be run.<\/p>\n<\/a>This certificate monitoring starts with the key certificates that are stored in your vCenter and expand beyond that, including your ESXi hypervisor certificates, SDDC Health, and more. It\u2019s worth pointing out that this comes with the vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) management pack, which means that if you created and automated a way to replace these certificates, then you will automatically replace a certification on a repetition (a great addition for web-based businesses, as well as most businesses out there running web-based applications). It\u2019s amazing\u2014 certificates run this world, yet we still forget to check when they expire.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>The integration with public-cloud pricing is all keyed in by the subscription or account with that provider. Then it pulls all the needed services being used. I\u2019m looking forward to getting my hands on this, as I really want to see what can be done to reduce that cost.<\/p>\n