In my initial post about vRealize Operations 6.6, I alluded to further content, this post is the 1st in a series of a more in depth look at the changes which have been released in 6.6.
There was a common theme across all personas running operations and this was increased time to value and product ease of use. The updated user interface in vROps 6.6 was designed with these exact goals in mind.
New HTML5 User Interface
The most significant change with vRealize Operations 6.6 is the new User Interface which is built using HTML5 and the VMware Clarity standard. This standard is being adopted by the majority of VMware products including vRealize Log Insight, Harbor and the HTML5 vSphere Client plus many more are moving towards this common user interface.
The primary reason is to ensure that the look and feel of all VMware products is uniform and consistent, over the years VMware products have had different UI’s along with look and feels and adopting the Clarity standard is working to address this.
A lot of comments from customers using previous versions of vROps has revolved around a consistent UI which is snappy, responsive and looks good. With the new HTML5 UI, VMware has certainly addressed this and I believe our customers will see the benefit immediately.
Here is how vRealize Operations 6.6 looks when you login:
For comparison, here is the same Home dashboard running in vRealize Operations 6.5
Quicker Navigation with the Getting Started Dashboard
The purpose of the Getting Started dashboard is to make it more simpler for IT staff to answer questions about their environment and to provide a quicker time to resolution.
The dashboard breaks down tasks into 5 different categories:
- Operations
- Capacity and Utilization
- Performance Troubleshooting
- Workload Balance
- Configuration and Compliance
Within each of these categories you can select different use cases and everyday problems that you are trying to solve.
For example,
- “Identify which hosts have the highest CPU demand and active and consumed memory.”
- “Get an overview of my entire environment and understand which VMs in each datacenter may have performance issues.”
Each of these problem statements is linked to an OOTB dashboard which can be accessed by clicking on the dashboard name on the right hand side of the page as shown below.
Persona Based Dashboards
In vRealize Operations 6.6, there was a complete refresh of all OOTB dashboards as in previous versions it was not very organised and caused confusion for customers. This refresh has been carried out to meet the business and technical requirements of different personas within the organisation.
Through the use of the Getting Started page, it is now much quicker to access different dashboards which address specific questions that are related to a particular persona.
The new dashboards have been designed to ensure that multiple scenarios and use cases can be met and help with day to day operations within an organisation.
OOTB Integration with vSAN + vRealize Automation
In previous versions of vRealize Operations when you wanted to collect data from either vSAN or vRealize Automation endpoints you had to install a separate Management Pack which presented it’s own set of integration issues.
With vRealize Operations 6.6 and following on from previous work with Log Insight and vRealize Business, vSAN and vRealize Automation have been fully integrated so they can be monitored and managed on Day 1 with vROps 6.6.
With massive demand for vSAN in the marketplace it was a requirement to provide a much more seamless insight into operations and the vSAN platform for customers. With vROps 6.6 this requirement has been achieved with dedicated dashboards for vSAN.
Here are the updated OOTB solutions in vRealize Operations 6.6:
As you can see a lot of work has gone into vRealize Operations 6.6 and this is just the UI changes.
Much more to come in future posts. Stay Tuned! 🙂
lukaswinn.net 
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