Transcript
Expert Reference Series of White Papers
vCenter Operations Manager (vCOPS): What It Is and Why You Should Use It 1-800-COURSESwww.globalknowledge.com
vCenter Operations Manager (vCOPS): What it is and why you should use it John Hales, Global Knowledge VMware instructor, A+, Network+, CTT+, MCSE, MCDBA, MOUS, MCT, VCP, VCAP, VCI, EMCSA
Introduction For years, vSphere has had alarms to let you know when things are above or below thresholds you specify. This is a great first step in identifying items that may require your attention and/or further investigation. The problem is that these thresholds are static; you set a value and are notified if it is above that value, such as CPU utilization >75%. While useful, it can lead to many false alarms if you have a virtual machine (VM) that routinely exceeds that value or one that spikes to that value for a while during a batch-processing interval. In those cases, that level of CPU utilization is expected and normal, and looking at it again just leads to wasted time, and soon to ignoring alarms as probable false positives. In addition, it fails to alert you if utilization is below normal, such as a service failure causing processing to stop. Knowing when you have a “real” issue is the key. The problem is when there really is an issue, you may ignore it, thinking it is not a real issue. There have been case studies done of companies that have worked on setting threshold for a year to find what the “right” values are for VMs. That is a huge waste of time and money, and it does not work well in a dynamic environment. Another issue for many deployments is that the VMs may have wasted resources – VMs that are over-provisioned, powered off, or even removed from the inventory, but still on disk. This wastes resources and drives up the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). The question is how to identify those resources and get them back. Conversely, other machines may not have the required resources to run well – which ones are they and what do they need? How do I know which VMs are consuming a lot of resources and impacting the performance of other VMs? All these, and many other questions, can be answered by carefully studying performance graphs in the vSphere Client (or the new Web Client) and monitoring alarms. The problem is, these tasks are time-intensive and administrator time is both expensive and at a premium. Enter vCenter Operations Manager (vCOPS). Let the computer do what it does best: monitoring and alerting, figuring out what is “normal”, and then notifying administrators when things are abnormal.
What Is It? vCOPS is a tool from VMware that is designed to analyze your environment, figure out what is “normal”, and alert you when abnormalities occur. These abnormalities can be at the VM, host, cluster, or data store levels. vCOPS is designed to help you find both undersized and oversized VMs as well as wasted resources. It can help you spot issues early. It provides root-cause analysis for issues detected. If you also have vCenter Configuration Manager (vCM – part of the vCOPS Management Suite), it can correlate events that occurred in the environment with results in the VM, host, etc. The tool will gather data over time and dynamically set thresholds and
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report back when they are exceeded. vCOPS is designed to alert you when things are not normal and not bother you about little events that are normal (and probably common) in your environment. The vCOPS Management Suite includes several other tools that are also useful in analyzing and diagnosing issues and relationships in your environment. The Where Do I Get It? section lists the options available in the suite, as well as details on other products that come with vCOPS, and the What Editions Are Available? section lists the capabilities available in each edition.
Why Do I Need It? Most environments with more than a few servers and a few dozen VMs need vCOPS (or a similar tool). There are just too many things going on and too few administrators to watch all that is happening to effectively manage issues. Also, there are too many false alarms raised for things that may be normal in an environment, such as a server using a lot of CPU doing batch processing overnight. This could be fixed by adjusting alarm values for those VMs, but that requires a lot of data-gathering and analysis to figure out what is “normal” for each VM and then implementing of those custom alarms on all affected VMs, leading to management by exception. The more data-gathering and analysis that take place in an environment, the more complex and costly it is to manage. vCOPS does what computers do best gather data and analyze it, alerting you to abnormal conditions. You can then fight the real fires by doing what people do best. The costs of not managing an environment well are unplanned outages, capacity limitations that lead to performance degradation, and, if left unchecked, possible outages, lack of resources when a failover event occurs, or no disk space, freezing all the VMs on any datastore in such a condition. The costs are just too high. For those who don’t monitor and then run into the problems above, days of downtime will quickly convince them of the need for some sort of monitoring. As of vSphere 5.1, the Foundation edition of vCOPS is included in the package for free, so there is really very little reason to not have at least a basic level of monitoring in place. According to VMware, the following are some of the benefits of deploying vCOPS. • A 36% reduction in downtime at the application level • A 26% reduction in the time it takes to diagnose and resolve a problem • A 40% increase in capacity utilization • A 37% increase in consolidation ratios (the number of VMs hosted per ESXi server) There have been case studies where organizations wanted to reduce the false alarms to as close to zero as possible, and it often takes many months (sometimes as long as a year) of data-gathering, weekly meetings to discuss the data, incremental changes in alarms, and analyses of the results to achieve the desired results. The cost of doing so is much higher than implementing vCOPS, and vCOPS brings many other capabilities to the table, as described in the next section.
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What Editions Are Available? There are four editions of vCOPS available, summarized in this table. Feature Foundation Smart Alerts • Automatically derived performance data • Health Monitoring • Dashboards to summarize details Dynamic thresholds Automatic root cause analysis with next step guidance Capacity guidance (oversized / undersized VMs) Capacity trending What-if scenarios Alerting and automated reporting Automated correlation between configuration changes and performance impacts Operational Compliance Automated workflow triggers Fully customizable dashboards Reports on meeting compliance requirements Automated remediation when compliance requirements not met Automated rollback for unapproved / out of compliance changes Automatically list apps & their versions running on each VM Automatic display of relationships between apps Fixed and variable costing for resources used by VM Costing reports Monitoring of MS operating systems (OSs) and applications Monitoring Oracle databases Automated monitoring and reporting on EMC and NetApp storage Guest OS reporting and management of changes, patches, and configuration updates
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Where Do I Get vCOPS? It is available from VMware’s web site at http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vcenteroperations-manager/overview.html. The Foundation edition is included with vSphere, and the other editions can be purchased as necessary. It is also available as part of the vCenter Operations Management Suite, which includes the following.
vCenter Operations Manager This is the subject of this white paper
vCenter Configuration Manager This tool allows for configuration management and monitoring of both physical or VM-based OSs (including Windows, Linux, and UNIX) and virtual infrastructure (including vSphere, vCenter, vCloud Director [vCD], and vShield) environments. Compliance can be audited, monitored, and remediated against industry or regulatory standards (including DISA, NIST, PCI, SOX, and HIPPA), vendor best practices (both VMware and Microsoft), and/ or internal company policies. Any changes detected can be correlated with changes in performance or other events (such as CPU or memory utilization) with the link to vCOPS. In addition, it can be used to deploy patches, distribute applications (Windows only), and provision supported OSs itself, either physically or virtually. When patches or applications are deployed, they can take a snapshot (on VMs) to allow quick rollback to the previous configuration if necessary.
vFabric Hyperic This part of the monitoring stack goes all the way to the application / service level to automatically inventory the hardware, OSs, applications, and services in the environment and the relationships between them. It can collect over 50,000 metrics on 75+ technologies, and can be extended to support just about any platform or technology. It gathers and reports on performance and availability in real time. In addition, it can gather baseline performance data to better understand what “normal” is and to assist in setting SLAs. Among the supported platforms and services are: • Virtualization platforms: vSphere, vCenter, vCD, and Xen • Operating systems: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, UNIX, HP/UX, AIX, and Cisco IOS • Databases: SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, GemFire, MySQL, DB2, and Sybase • Email platforms: Exchange, Zimbra, Lotus Domino, and Sendmail • Web / Proxy servers: Apache, IIS, and Squid • Directory services: Active Directory and OpenLDAP • Application servers: Tomcat, WebLogic, WebSphere, and JBoss • Application platforms: .NET, JEE, J2EE, LAMP, and Spring. • Miscellaneous: Bugzilla, Microsoft Terminal Services, SNMP, SMTP, IMAP, POP, DNS, DHCP, SSH, and SQL queries
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vCenter Infrastructure Navigator (VIN) This tool provides simple application to OS-to-host visualization capabilities, with data and views that can be exported. Inside the tool, VMs can be grouped together to view relationships and these application groups can be viewed and reported on in the native vCOPS interface, bringing application monitoring and management into the same UI framework.
vCenter Chargeback Manager This product is designed to allow IT departments to assign costs for IT resources (CPU, memory, network, disk space and I/Os, license costs, etc.) so that when you create or run a VM , the cost of doing so can either be shared with business units, departments, etc., or they can be charged back, making IT another business unit, not just a cost center. Costs can be fixed (e.g., software costs, licensing costs, administrative overhead), based on how much is allocated (e.g., vCPUs or memory assigned or storage space consumed), and/or utilization based (e.g., CPU cycles consumed, disk or network I/O bandwidth consumed, etc.). People tend to think more carefully when there is a cost associated with their actions (such as creating VMs with less resources) versus when they are free. Why not take all you can? Reporting to and accountability by departments, administrators, developers, etc., is thus engendered. More information on the vCenter Operations Management Suite can be found at: http://www.vmware.com/ products/datacenter-virtualization/vcenter-operations-management/overview.html. The vCenter Operations Management Suite is also included as part of the vCloud Suite, which adds: vSphere This suite includes vSphere Enterprise Plus as well as vCenter Standard. vCloud Director (vCD) This tool transforms the basic vSphere virtualization platform into a cloud-based one, leveraging vSphere, vCenter, etc., to create what VMware calls “the software-defined datacenter.” The basic virtualization of storage, networking, CPU, and memory provided by vSphere is enhanced with self-service provisioning (with a variety of roles to provide the right combination of privileges and security), automation, and strong security boundaries to allow multiple departments, divisions, or even companies to coexist on the same physical hardware without knowing any of the others exist, or having any access to them (unless allowed by an administrator, for example within a company). Thus, IT can create Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds. Quotas on space consumption and leases can be created to control resource utilization and ensure that provisioned resources are actually used. vCloud Connector This tool comes in Core and Datacenter Extension (DCE) editions; DCE is included with the vCloud Suite. Both allow the connection of an unlimited number of private and/or public clouds together with a single, unified view of them all to manage VMs, vApps, and templates. DCE also adds the ability to move between clouds without reconfiguring networking settings. Content Sync is also available with the vCloud Suite, allowing templates added to a source catalog in a source cloud to be synchronized with other clouds, making new templates quickly available throughout the infrastructure. Copyright ©2013 Global Knowledge Training LLC. All rights reserved.
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vCloud Networking and Security (vCNS) One of the foundations of large clouds, especially public clouds, is a secure, scalable network infrastructure. While VLANs can be used, their scalability is limited (only 4,094 are possible when used with the virtual networking capabilities of vSphere). VXLAN overcomes this limitation with essentially unlimited networks possible, scalable across hosts, clusters, even vCenter instances, all without requiring the physical networking infrastructure to be reconfigured with each change. This tool also provides NAT, firewall, VPN, and load-balancing functionality. You can use this tool with vSphere / vCenter alone or in conjunction with vCD. It can also be used with VMware View to deploy and protect a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) SRM provides the ability to quickly recover from site-level disasters (such as earthquakes and fires), resuming operations at a secondary facility. It can also do this as part of a datacenter migration and/or consolidation initiative. It can use the native replication capabilities built into vSphere 5 to replicate at the VM level, or it can replicate at the storage-array level, utilizing the native capabilities of the array to replicate LUNs. It automates both failover and failback, with a complete history of actual failovers as well as a list of non-disruptive trial failovers, proving that the system works, without interrupting production during the tests, making frequent tests possible. vFabric Application Director This tool is aimed at providing the basis for Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) infrastructures by providing a simple, easy to use interface to link parts of an application together for deployment purposes in conjunction with self service provisioning by developers. Scripts (including those based on PowerShell and Perl) can be integrated as well to make deployment simple and repeatable. While optimized for the vFabric suite of products, it supports any app (including both prepackaged apps [such as any Microsoft application] and custom apps built in .NET, Java, etc., on any cloud or combination of clouds, including Amazon’s E2C, making cloud computing without regard to virtualization platform much easier. vCloud Automation Center This tool is designed to quickly provision physical and/or virtual infrastructures across hypervisors (including vSphere, Hyper-V, and Xen Server) and clouds, whether or not they are based on VMware technologies (including Amazon’s E2C and Microsoft’s Azure), as well as physical servers. It can be used to deploy desktops as well as servers, unlike many other tools that are primarily focused on servers. It can be used to deploy IaaS, PaaS, and/ or DaaS (Database-as-a-Service) cloud platforms. The automation capabilities are designed to span tools and technologies to make management and deployment as simple as possible. It is designed with policies in mind to meet business and user requirements and corporate governance needs. There are 3 editions of the vCloud Suite, Standard, Advanced, and Enterprise. All include vSphere, vCD, vCloud Connector, and vCloud Networking and Security. Advanced adds vCOPS Advanced, and Enterprise upgrades vCOPS to Enterprise and adds the remaining products listed above. More information on the vCloud Suite can be found at http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vcloud-suite/overview.html.
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vSphere with Operations Management is a bundled offering that includes both vCOPS and the basic vSphere product. It comes in 3 editions, the same 3 that vSphere comes in, each with a copy of vCOPS standard. Note that vCenter is not included with this product, but is required. More information on vSphere with Operations Management can be found at: http://www.vmware.com/products/ datacenter-virtualization/vsphere/management.html.
Learn More To learn more about how you can improve productivity, enhance efficiency, and sharpen your competitive edge, Global Knowledge suggests the following courses: VMware vCenter Operations Manager: Analyze and Predict [V5.0] Visit www.globalknowledge.com or call 1-800-COURSES (1-800-268-7737) to speak with a Global Knowledge training advisor.
About the Author John Hales, VCP, VCAP, VCI, is a VMware instructor at Global Knowledge, teaching all of the vSphere and View classes that Global Knowledge offers. John is also the author of many books (including a book on vSphere 5: Administering vSphere 5: Planning, Implementing, and Troubleshooting by Cengage), from involved technical books from Sybex, to exam preparation books, to many quick reference guides from BarCharts, in addition to custom courseware for individual customers. John has various certifications, including the VMware VCP (3, 4, and 5), VCAP, and VCI; the Microsoft MCSE, MCDBA, MOUS, and MCT; the EMC EMCSA (Storage Administrator for EMC Clariion SANs); and the CompTIA A+, Network+, and CTT+. John lives with his wife and children in Sunrise, Florida.
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