Finally, vCOPS 5.6 is released. I was eagerly waiting for it. Few of the highlights of this new release

1. vCenter Server Compatibility
   vCenter Operations Manager now supports VMware vCenter Server 5.1 and ESXi 5.1. Beta versions of vCenter Server and ESXi hosts are not supported in this 5.6 release.
2. Integration with VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator
   This release introduces integration with vCenter Infrastructure Navigator. You can use application awareness for operations monitoring, troubleshooting, and planning.
3. Integration with VMware vCenter Configuration Manager
   This release provides deeper integration with vCenter Configuration Manager. A new Compliance badge under the Risk badge enables you to understand compliance risks, and to correlate the changes that are affecting the compliance risk.
4. Integration in the VMware vSphere Web Client
   This release introduces vCenter Operations Manager integration in the vSphere Web Client. Badges appear in the vSphere Web Client interface when you register an instance of VMware vCenter Operations Manager with a vCenter Server that you want to monitor.
5. Custom Groups
   This release introduces user-defined and pre-defined custom groups. You can use the groups feature to customize the operational view of your infrastructure, tailoring it to your business environment. You can also customize group settings using policies.
6. Capacity Analysis
   This release enhances capacity planning by introducing more granular setting for capacity analysis.
7. Interpretations and Recommendations
   This release introduces context-sensitive explanations and next-step guidance for virtual machine, host, datastore, and cluster details.
8. Custom Reports (Experimental)
   This release introduces an experimental feature for configuring user-defined and pre-defined custom reports.
9. Custom User Interface Enhancements
   This release provides enhancements to the Custom user interface

Let’s hope we see more documentation about vCOPS with this new release

Sharing Dashboard is one of the cool features available in vCOPS. You need to have Advance or Enterprise Edition to get Dashboard functionality. For more information about vCOPS features and their editions,  please click here

We are going to use the Local user account for this blog. I will write another blog for LDAP access. We would need two things here.

1. Create the necessary Groups and User account
2. Create the Dashboard, Share it and assign it to the group

Steps to create local user account

1. Go to custom Dashboard URL
2. Click on Admin -> Security
3. The following screen will be displayed
4. Security User Management

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5. Click on Add New Group
6. New Group

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7. Fill in the Group Details
8. Group Details

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9. Click on the Group Testing
10. New Group Added

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11. Add a new user for that group. We are using local user accounts here
12. User Addition

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13. Fill in the User Account Details
14. User Detials

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15. Now you have added the user information to the group

Sharing the Dashboard

1. Select the Dashboard
2. Click on the Share link, just below the Dashboard
3. Share Dashboard

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4. Drag the Dashboard from the left, to the Testing Group, what was created earlier.
5. Shared Dashboard list

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6. Once, the Dashboard is shared, you will see a yellow icon next to the dashboard name
7. Yellow Icon

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8. Now, you access the custom url with the local username and password that was created earlier, you will see the shared dashboard.

There is more to this, you can give necessary permission on the dashboard for the users. That warrants for another blog entry

Badge in vCenter Operations Manager

vCenter Operations Manager uses badges to illustrate derived metrics to provide an overview of the state of the virtual environment or an individual object. These badges serve as focus points to narrow the scope of a potential problem and provide details about the cause of the problem.
vCenter Operations Manager provides major and minor badges that are color coded and range from a healthy green to a potentially problematic yellow, orange, or red.

Scores might reflect a healthy state or a potential problem depending on the type of badge. For example

1. Low scores for health, time remaining, and capacity remaining might indicate potential problems.
2. Low scores for faults, stress, or anomalies indicate a normal state.

There are 3 Major badges

1. Health Badge
2. Risk Badge
3. Efficiency Badge

Health Badge

Health badge serves as the first high-level indicator of the state of the virtual environment. The Health badge indicates immediate problems that might require your attention. It helps you identify the current health of your system.

The overall health score for an object ranges from 0 (bad) to 100 (good). vCenter Operations Manager calculates the Health score using the scores of the sub-badges that the Health badge contains. The badge changes its color based on the badge score thresholds that are set by the vCenter Operations Manager administrator.

There are 3 minor badge;

1. Workload Badge
2. Anomalies Badge
3. Faults Badge

Faults are given precedence in the Health score because they describe existing problems, while Workload and Anomalies are combined to identify performance problems. This approach ensures that the score of the Health badge reflects the actual state of the object, without overexposing or underestimating problems.

Workload Badge

The vCenter Operations Manager Workload badge measures how hard an object must work for resources. A workload score of 0 indicates that a resource is not being used and a score that approaches or exceeds 100 might cause performance problems.

The Workload score ranges from 0 (good) to over 100 (bad). The badge changes its color based on the badge score thresholds that are set by the vCenter Operations Manager administrator. Both Anomalies and Workload are useful when attempting to find a probable cause and troubleshooting performance problems

Anomalies Badge

Anomalies badge measures the extent of abnormal behavior for an object based on historical metrics data. A high number of anomalies might indicate a potential issue. A low Anomalies score indicates that an object is behaving in accordance with its established historical parameters. A high number of anomalies usually indicates a problem or at least a situation that requires your attention.

Both Anomalies and Workload are useful when attempting to find a probable cause and troubleshooting performance problems. The Anomalies score ranges between 0 (good) and 100 (bad). The badge changes its color based on the badge score thresholds that are set by the vCenter Operations Manager administrator.

Faults Badge

Faults badge measure the degree of problems that the object might experience based on events retrieved from the vCenter Server. The events that might generate faults include the loss of redundancy in NICs or HBAs, memory checksum errors, high availability failover, or Common Information Model (CIM) events, which require your immediate attention. The Faults score ranges between 0 (no faults) and 100 (critical faults). The badge changes its color based on the badge score thresholds that are set by the vCenter Operations Manager administrator.

Risk Badge

Risk badge indicates a potential performance problem in the near future that might affect the virtual environment. vCenter Operations Manager calculates the risk score using the scores of the sub-badges that the Risk badge contains. The overall Risk score for an object ranges between 0 (no risk) to 100 (serious risk).

Ther are 3 minor bardges under Risk Badge

1. Time Remaining Badge
2. Capacity Remaining Badge
3. Stress Badge

Time Remaining Badge

Time Remaining badge measures the time before a resource associated with an object reaches capacity. This badge indicates the available timeframe to provision or load balance the physical or virtual resources for a selected object. The Time Remaining score ranges between 0 (bad) and 100 (good).

Capacity Remaining Badge

Capacity Remaining badge measures the number of additional virtual machines that the object can handle before reaching capacity. The remaining virtual machines count represents the number of virtual machines that can be deployed on the selected object, based on the current amount of unused resources and the average virtual machine profile for the last “n” weeks. The remaining virtual machines count is a function of the same compute resources of CPU, Mem, Disk I/O, Net I/O, and Disk Space that are used to calculate the Time Remaining score. The Capacity Remaining score ranges between 0 (bad) and 100 (good).

Stress Badge

Stress badge measures a long-term workload that might involve undersized virtual machines or ESX hosts or an excessive number of virtual machines. These conditions might generate performance problems over time. The Stress score helps you identify hosts and virtual machines that do not have enough resources allocated, or hosts that are running too many virtual machines. A high Stress score does not imply a current performance problem, but highlights potential for future performance problems. The Stress score ranges between 0 (good) and 100 (bad).

Efficiency Badge

Manager Efficiency badge identifies the potential opportunities to improve the performance or cost of your virtual environment. Efficiency accounts for the waste and infrastructure density in your environment. A large amount of wasted resources combined with a low density ratio generates a poor efficiency score. The Efficiency score ranges between 0 (bad) and 100 (good).

There are 2 Badges under Efficiency Badge

1. Reclaimable Waste Badge
2. Density Badge

Reclaimable Waste Badge

Reclaimable Waste badge accounts for resource types such as CPU, memory, or disk, and measures the extent of excessive provisioning for an object. It also identifies the amount of resources that you can reclaim and provision to other objects in your virtual environment. The Reclaimable Waste score ranges between 0 (good) and 100 (bad).

Density Badge

Density badge measures consolidation ratios to assess cost savings. You can assess the behavior and performance of a virtual machine and related applications to maximize the consolidation ratio without affecting the performance or service level agreements. The Density score ranges between 0 (bad) and 100 (good).

vCenter Operations Manager (vCOPS) collects performance data from each object at every level of your virtual environment. It stores and analyzes the data, and uses that analysis to provide real-time information about problems, or potential problems, anywhere in your virtual environment.

It provides following function

• Combines key metrics into single scores for environmental health and efficiency and capacity risk.
• Calculates the range of normal behavior for every metric and highlights abnormalities. Adjusts the dynamic thresholds as incoming data allows it to better define the normal values for a metric.
• Presents graphical representations of current and historical states of your entire virtual environment or selected parts of it.
• Displays information about changes in the hierarchy of your virtual environment. For example, when a virtual machine is moved to a different ESX host, you can see how these changes affect the performance of the objects involved.

Definition

Attributes – Each type of data that vCenter Operations Manager collects is called an attribute

Metrics – An instance of an attribute for a specific inventory object is called a metric. For example, free memory for a specific virtual machine is a metric

Metric Value – Each piece of data that vCenter Operations Manager collects is called a metric value

Dynamic Thresholds – vCenter Operations Manager defines dynamic thresholds for every metric based on the current and historical values of the metric. The normal range of values for a metric can differ on different days at different times because of regular cycles of use and behavior.

Hard Thresholds – Unlike dynamic thresholds, hard thresholds are fixed values that you enter to define what is normal behavior for an object. These arbitrary values do not change over time unless you change them manually.

Key Performance Indicators – vCenter Operations Manager defines attributes that are critical to the performance of an object as key performance indicators (KPI). KPI are weighted more heavily in the calculations that determine the health of an object.

Metrics Concept – To get more information about this, please click on the following link

Object Type

vCenter Operations Manager uses specific icons so that you can distinguish between virtual machines, ESX hosts, and other objects in the inventory. All these objects will be monitored via inventory pane in vCOPS

vCOPS has lots of features and a big learning curve is involved here. This product is not that matured but still it is extremely helpful for the organization.

There are multiple ways through which, you can get free disk space inside a VM. I was playing with it and finally, I was able to get it right. I will be eager to learn/see how others have implemented this solution in their environment.

I wanted, following information for our environment.

1. Free disk space for C:\
2. Free disk space for D:\
3. Aggregate free disk space for the VM.

I tried, this only for Windows machine, but this should not be difficult for any other type of OS.

Steps that you need to follow

1. Go to custom Dashboard – i.e https:\\ip_of_ui\custom
2. Click the “+” for the New dashboard
3. Select Executive 2 Template  and drag Heat Map along with Geo Widget
4. Give Storage 1 as the “Tab Name”
5. Click “ok”
6. Delete the Geographical Map from the Dashboard by clicking “close widget”
7. Click Edit on Dashboard Tools
8. Change the column to 1
9. Click “OK”
10. Now, you have a complete Dashboard just for this widget
11. Click on “Edit Heat Map” Widget
12. Change the Widget Title from “Application Heatmap by SILO” to what ever you think makes sense to you
13. Change the settings. You can see the screen shot.  The trick to save the configuration is first to click on the plus sign and give it a name., I learned it the hard way :)
14. The trick here is the min and max value. In this case, I have selected 15 and 30. That means, that anything close to 30 and above should be in “red”. This can help you to understand the VMs that are hoarding disk space. We can clearly go for thin disk inside the VM and save that space. But, that is all together a different conversation
15. C drive Free Space

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16. Once you click on “OK” you will see something like this
17. 48 GB free disk space

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18. The above screen clearly shows the VM name and the disk space used by them. We should look closely for the VMs that are in “Red”
19. Let’s try to get the aggregate for all the drives. This will help us to understand overall disk free space in each VM.
20. Aggregate Free Space

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21. Once, you click on “OK”. You will get the over all disk usage for each VM
22. Agg free disk space

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I am sure, management will be very happy to see who is taking more most disk space in their environment.