New Book - VMware vRealize Operations Essentials

Have you ever wanted to understand vRealize Operations?  Well, my colleague and friend Matthew Steiner (Blog | Twitter) has written a book entitled VMware vRealize Operations Essentials which is now available on Amazon and Packet Publishing.

So, why should you buy this book?  If you've ever seen Matt present at a VMUG or had the please of attending a meeting with him you'll very quickly learn that he knows his stuff when it comes to vRealize Operations Manager whether is be policies, super metrics or capacity planning and 3rd party integration.

Secondly Matt is very generously donating all his royalties to the Princes Trust in Scotland.  He is hoping to raise £5,000 in the next 18 months so this is all for a very good cause.

So if you want to improve your knowledge and skills on vRealize Operations and help out a charity then purchase the book.

No Health State Data after upgrade to vSphere 5.5 Update 2

I upgraded my lab environment to vSphere 5.5 Update 2 and when I logged into the Web Client I noticed that the health state information was no longer being shown.  The error I received was:

Cannot connect to the vCenter Operations server.  Check your network connection, and the running state of the virtual machines in the vCenter Operations Manager vApp

I check the vApp and network connectivity and everything was fine.  There is no firewall in-between these two hosts so I knew that wasn't the issue.  I then tried unregistering and re-registering the vCenter servers in vCenter Operations Manager by logging into the vCenter Operations Manager admin interface and un-registering and re-registering both vCenter Servers:

Once completed the vCenter Operations Appliance showed that it was unlicensed so I had to go back to vCenter and correctly license the solution again.  After a few minutes the appliance was fully licensed but still no information in the Health State.  My other vCenter which was not upgraded to 5.5 U2 works fine so I can only assume the upgrade done something with the certificates.

If anyone knows the fix for this then let me know, otherwise I'll update this post when I fix it

** UPDATE - 11/09/2014 **

I've just noticed that the option to open an object within vCenter Operations is greyed out on the vCenter that was upgraded to 5.5 U2 but not on the vCenter that's still 5.5 U1

vCenter 5.5 U1

vCenter 5.5 U2

I've also check the vCenter Managed Object Browser and both vCenter servers look to be configured identical for com.vmware.vcops so that rules out certificates.

vCOPS report to help size for vCloud Air

I was asked recently by one of my partners if there was a specific report that can be run within vCenter Operations Manager to help gather the size of an environment to then quote for some vCloud Air resources.  The best report to run to gather this information is the Virtual Machine List Report:

This will produce the following report for all VM's that vCOPS is currently monitoring:

You can also use the legacy C# client to gather this information and export to a .csv file if you prefer:

One thing to point out with the C# client is that it will show total space provisioned which will include snapshots and overhead.

Upgrading vCops 5.6 to 5.7

With the recent release of VMware vCenter Operation Manager 5.7 and having just recently installed version 5.6 I thought I'd upgrade since it was still going through the "collecting data" phase.  As mentioned, I'm currently using version 5.6:

I've downloaded the 5.7 .pak file which can be used to upgrade from 5.0.0, or 5.0.1, or 5.0.2, or 5.0.3, or 5.6.0 to 5.7.0.  To upgrade simple browse the to the UI vApp VM with the following URL and login with your details:

https://UI_vApp_VM_IP Address/admin/

Once logged in browse to the Update tab and browse to the recently downloaded file:

 

Click update to start uploading the file to the server:

Once the file has been uploaded you need to accept the licenses agreement and click OK:

You will be advised that you will be logged out of the admin portal until the upgrade has completed and all services have restarted.  The upgrade should start and if you log back into the admin portal you will see the progress:

Check to ensure all the services have started successfully:

Once the core services have started the appliance will be at version 5.7  To verify this check the status tab in the admin console:

Log into vCenter and check the plugins to ensure they are now using version 5.7: