Category Archives: vRealize

Featured, IT operations, Virtualization, vRealize, vROps

What’s New with VMware vRealize

What’s new with vRealize?

Today VMware announced updates to 4 major products with vRealize branding (3 within the suite and 1 not). Even though the version increments are small, the features they bring are not! vRealize Operations, Log Insight, Network Insight, and Business for Cloud have all received updates. So let’s get started, shall we?

vRealize Operations 6.6

Right out of the gate, you will notice something very different in this build of vRealize Operations (lovingly known as vROps). That’s right, they’ve embraced HTML5! If you’ve been using the HTML5 client for vSphere, you’ll see this looks very familiar (it’s the same underlying engine in both). It is great to see VMware continuing to phase out flash and embrace something everyone can use. Also in this build is a revised “Getting Started” page. More and more people are just starting out with adding vROps into their environment, and making the product easier to newcomers is always welcome, just make sure there is an easy way to dismiss all the getting started notifications for the power users. These new dashboards are based on types of rolls (Operations, Troubleshooting, Compliance, etc…). Combine these with greater out of the box integrations with things like vSAN, Log Insight, Automation, and you’ve got a pretty powerful tool to get started with.

vRealize VMware

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of the other big new features arriving in this update revolves around DRS. Imagine, if you would, that you could enhance DRS with the power of vROps. While by itself DRS is fantastic for load balancing in a cluster, now you can load balance across the entire data center. This new combination will allow you to automatically move workloads to different clusters and different datastores. Now, take it one step further. While DRS by itself is a reaction based process (it only kicks in once there is resource contention) when you can utilize the analytic engine of vROps you can get ahead of the curve. Spotting patterns in workloads will allow DRS to move things ahead of time to ensure that your VMs have the resources available before the increase in load. They call this Predictive DRS (pDRS). I’ll be looking into this further in a later post, but this has the potential to be a real game changer for VMware.

Predictive DRS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And finally, one last thing, and I thought this was a bit interesting. There has also been development around hardening/compliance. There is a new dashboard that will tell you how hardened your components are (based on VMware’s hardening guide) and how compliant things are. This even goes so far as to checking your environment against HCL.

vRealize Operations 6.6

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

vRealize Log Insight 4.5

This update is a bit smaller than the vROps one and it revolves around vROps as well. In this update, they’ve added closer integration with vROps. In fact, now you can launch Log Insight directly from the vROps dashboard. You can auto initiate log management to get to the bottom of the alerts you are seeing in vROps. Now to achieve this, they had to make more enhancements to the single sign-on support, so it would seem this is working better.

vRealize Business for Cloud 7.3

Now I’ll admit, this is the product that I’m the least familiar with. For those of you not familiar with this tool, its great for larger environments that want to get a handle on hybrid cloud. You can break down your costs of your VMs and map them against various providers to get a cost analysis. In this update, Azure has been recognized as a major player in the cloud market and has been promoted to that status within the analytics engine. The AWS integration has also been improved with enhanced VM level statistics. There are also some new out of the box reporting capabilities. One of the best ones is a new Daily Pricing Report. Administrators can configure a daily email (or spreadsheet) that will itemize your data center costs so that you can keep better track of costs.

 

 

 

 

Sean’s Take

It’s great to see more enhancements to these products. It’s clear that vROps is getting a long-needed overhaul and being placed in the center of things, with its ability to reach into every product and maximize its benefit. If you haven’t had the chance, I urge you to give it a try and see what it can do for you. As VMware embraces Amazon and Azure, they want to make sure you also get the most out of it, which is why we see these additional enhancements in that space as well.

On a related subject, check out our recent webinar, “Harnessing Lightning: DevOps + ITOM for Secure & Compliant Hybrid Cloud Ops“

By Sean Thulin, Advanced Virtualization Consultant

Featured, Miscellaneous IT, vRealize, vSOM

25% vSOM Discount Ends December 31st!

25% vSOM DiscountDid you know VMware’s offering a 25% vSOM discount? That’s right, VMware has been providing a 25% discount to upgrade to vSOM from naked vSphere since Labor Day weekend. The standard upgrade price is $825 MSRP, but the promo price drops it down to $620 MSRP. That’s over a $200 savings per CPU. There are some serious savings to be had here so I wanted to quickly bring you up to speed so you could assess the solution and see if it makes sense for your organization.

25% vSOM discount ENDS ON DECEMBER 31!

 

So what is vSOM? It’s a bundle of vSphere and vRealize Operations (formally known as vCOPS). When reviewing monitoring and management toolsets with a broad stroke, it’s easy to say they’re nice to have but not absolutely necessary. Yet if you dive deeper, there are many features and functions that make the investment worthwhile in the long-term growth and planning of your virtualization environment.

vRealize Operations enables IT to not just see immediate issues, but also potential future problems which can have a dramatic impact on reducing unplanned outages.  With Predictive Analytics and Smart Alerts, it proactively identifies and remedies system issues, while dynamic thresholds automatically adapt to environments to provide fewer and more specific alerts resulting in a 30 percent DECREASE in time to diagnose and resolve performance issues. That’s three hours of your day you get back allowing you to work on improving and emerging your environment rather than troubleshooting constant alert noises and notifications.

The old saying, it’s better to be safe than sorry, speaks volumes in a virtual environment and especially in over-provisioning. Research has shown that 9 out of 10 virtual machines are over-provisioned. While this may not seem like a bad thing on the surface, it leads to diminishing efficiency and optimization within the virtual infrastructure and, more importantly, increased infrastructure costs. Having the ability to manage your VMs more closely and effectively with vRealize Operations (vCOPS), you can finely tune each VM, allocating the resources that are really necessary and as a result save up to 30% in potential hardware costs. This solution provides a holistic overview of your virtualized environment and provides deep insight into the health of your infrastructure which would otherwise be invisible. Capacity planning is another key feature of the vRealize Operations toolset allowing you to model future resource needs and alert on constraints before those constraints result in unexpected system downtime.

Years ago many wondered what the ROI was for ESX?  It was nice to be able to put several VMs on one server, but was it needed?  When we moved from physical to virtual it was a big step, an unknown “pie in the sky” concept that made sense on paper, but would it work and would it be a worthy investment?  Well now we know that moving to a VM environment made sense, and for some it was easy to manage. However, this inevitably led to the issue of resource and VM sprawl and a lack of visibility to overall infrastructure health. vRealize Operations is a comprehensive tool which can provide predictive analytics, capacity planning, and performance and health management.  Hence, it is very much a “have to have” vs. a “nice to have.”

If you’re looking for more information on vRealize, I would suggest downloading this whitepaper.

Now is the time to take advantage of a good deal on a great product! As always, GreenPages can help. If you would like to learn more, get a demo or make the purchase, fill out this form and we’ll be in touch!

 

By Rob O’Shaughnessy, Director of Software Sales & Renewals