vRealize Operations Musings
This post is a quick delve into the world of vRealize Operations. Let me state up front I'm not a fan but I thought I'd try and trace why and have a fresh look at the product to find some good points that would help balance my perspective a bit!
I was responsible for the delivery of Microsoft System Center Operations Manager back in the day for about a year on and off. I thought then and still do that it's over-engineered. You can tell from some products if they were designed well and intuitive to use, and others where nothing is how you'd expect it.
I read a book a few months ago about design theory, related to doors and things like that. A glass door with no obvious handle will confuse people as to which way it opens and via which side, cue broken nose or broken glass everywhere. My opinion is SCOM is like that. VMware vRealize Operations echoes that feeling to me but is no way as bad, but still it's not in a good place compared to other software products I work with which is a shame.
To give you an example - cue how to add a vCenter into vRealize Operations:
When you first log into vRealize and the dust is settling you see this:
Ok, I thought, where do I add my vCenter. I click on the plus and get this:
What's a PAK file?!! Do I need one? That's what I mean. You have to highlight the VMware vSphere solution on the previous screen, then click on the configure cogs button to get this:
Intuitive? Hardly!
I've already added mine here, seems ok? Wait until you get to the credentials section, type in administrator@vsphere.local and have a laugh to yourself! You have to add a credential - see the plus beside the credential area to get this:
Ok, so it's not a big thing but these two items are enough to trip me up for 5 minutes, figuring out where and why. I know there's documentation but if you've worked in IT for a few years is it too much to expect that you will get a more intuitive start to the product. This is key as this is the impression that will stay with you. I know, it's stayed with me...!
It's that kind of structure that determines how much you're going to like playing with a product long after you've gotten it working the way you want. Take reports as an other example. You can output basic inventory reports, I did so and got blank, zip, nada detail in them:
So I chose to get a Hardware Summary. You need to highlight the report, THEN click the play button on the taskbar (no right click here) - again why is it designed this way, the second from last icon?!!!!! WHY????!! Then you get to choose from the following:
So, the defaults look good, let's go with vSphere World, right? This is the result:
There are two problems here, the lack of data and the formatting. Let's fix the data first, you need to run the report but choose THIS fecker from the non default drop down list:
So instead of the default "custom groups" at the top, I chose "all objects" and then pointed the dozy product at my only connected resource, my vCenter Datacenter. Not exactly hard but completely irrational for a VMware Product. This is the result:
I love the thought that went into the header, footer, 1st page VMware logos and index but there's one small problem, the 40 pages of content looks like the above. Now, you do have a CSV option but we all know that requires a little massaging. If I wanted to schedule a report to email itself weekly, this one isn't going to do it for me. I'd have to edit the template and only add sufficient fields to fill the width. There's no obvious formatting option to correct this so it's pretty much useless. One of the most basic reports I could think of too. Get RVTOOLS here by the way, much better:
Now, about scheduling useful reports.....you can email them and save them to a network share, so that's something. I setup saving them to a share and you can choose weekly or monthly but that's it, no choice over the format either?! You can choose the start hour but not the minute, try testing your settings once per hour that way, see where I'm going?! No way to manually test the schedule either. Still think an Engineer designed this?!! No idea if it works or what the format is - I gave up here.....!!
I did spot one nice thing when I was configuring the vCenter connection, that is to check compliance against the vSphere Hardening Guide. Brilliant!
Define Monitoring Goals is one of the optional sections when setting up the vCenter connect - it defaults to No, even after you save it (!) but I am getting alerts for my Hosts and VMs against the hardening guide settings which is very useful. Thought I'd need configuration manager for that but at least it's a bonus here.
So, that's one thing I'd definitely find useful beyond Host Profiles and the battle I have with them regularly! There's an associated report, great, let's run it!
The format is better at least but look at the number of pages - 236!!! Lol. So not that useful then. Like host profiles I'd be better off using scripts etc to do the hardening (unless you've bought vRealize Configuration Manager) and using this report to audit compliance........
There are good growth forecast reports which are useful, I'm not going to be running vRealize in my lab long enough to see the benefit but capacity planning is a strength and good to have.
One other thing, when you run a report, once it finishes the screen refreshes so you've to scroll down AGAIN to find the damn thing unless you use a filter first. Annoying, simple for someone to fix but I doubt it ever will be.....
Here's a report on reclaimable space:
No percents listed, I've several templates but it's not clear if this means it didn't detect them or as they are thin provisioned there's nothing to reclaim off them.
I love this report:
Very Graphic, clear and precise and tells us absolutely nothing....!
Now I think you can blame the user on this one, I'm sure after some additional knowledge & upskilling, training and time the product would deliver everything VMware raves about but a door is a door, put a handle on it and don't waste my time searching for things that should be obvious. Defaults should work for the most common use cases, like vCenter objects in reports. Maybe they intended to use this with a much wider palette than vCenter but if that's your core base, play to them first. This doesn't feel like a product designed by VMware to work with vCenter, doesn't that sound wierd to you? Like they wanted to connect this to all your physical servers too (there are agents for that) and suck in everything here.
I finally decided to find the best view to put on a TV in an Ops room and this was it:
Not too bad. Given time it should provide more detail than my labs shows here and you can customize these (Advanced or Enterprise only) to your needs a bit more. There's a good blog post here on reports via this newer HTML 5 interface in 6.6:
I've not yet found a good resource about creating custom dashboards in 6.6 as all the articles are on the previous version and no longer valid.
So, it's all down to if you're already bought into vROps via a licensing deal or do you have flexibility to look at other solutions. I'm very fond of Veeam One but whatever you choose / end up using you need to ensure it delivers sufficient quality information and no more, otherwise a spammed inbox isn't going to get any attention.
Use the VMware Hands On Labs to look at this product or download a trial of the OVF like I did. I hope you find this useful and get the right solution for your Organisation. Best of Luck!
