Today is an important day for the Cloud Management Business Unit at VMware as the latest release of vRealize Operations 6.7 is now GA and available for download from My VMware.
This is my first release of vRealize Operations where I have been on the other side of the fence in R&D and have had a lot more exposure during its development but could not say anything until today!
So what’s new with this release?
The focus for this release was to build on the changes made in vRealize Operations 6.6 in regards to usability of the product and making it easier to consume.
In addition, fundamental changes were made to how capacity is calculated with a complete replacement of the Capacity Analytics engine which allows for more predictive and real time analytics.
Finally there is now Application Monitoring which uses the power of Wavefront by VMware.
Main features and enhancements
Advancements to Analytics
- Predictive and real time analytics which allow for continuous performance and optimization of workloads that is based on business and operational usage.
- New Capacity Overview, reclamation and planning UI workflows using the new real time capacity analytics – this ultimately results in quicker time to value for users.
- Native visibility of cost usage for capacity overview, reclamation and planning along with cost comparison when adding workloads across different cloud providers including VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) or AWS native as well as Private Cloud (on-premises).
Introducing Agent Monitoring in Wavefront and Automated Lifecycle Agent Management
- vRealize Operations Manager 6.7 introduces integration with Wavefront by VMware which allows you to send OS and Application Metrics from a VM with an agent installed to Wavefront via a new component – VMware Application Proxy.
- Smart agent lifecycle management which discovers what application services are installed on the VM’s and provides a simple UI to automatically install Telegraf agents on multiple VM’s with the added ability to track the deployment status.
- New Telegraf agent supports the monitoring of a diverse set of application services by collecting and sending the relevant metrics into Wavefront via the VMware Application Proxy.
Improvements to User Experience
- Updated Quick Start page when you launch the product, which lays out the key areas of the product and provides functional based easy to access workflows:
- Optimize Performance
- Optimize Capacity
- Troubleshoot
- Manage Configuration
- Ability to customize the home page of vRealize Operations Manager (if desired) to something other than the default
- Smarter dashboards, widgets, and views are now available with new colorized palettes and new data unit capabilities including percentage. In addition you now have conditional formatting and cell coloring.
- Dark Theme has now been introduced if you want a change from the standard theme.
- New Compliance workflow has been added to provide complete vSphere infrastructure compliance and measurement against vSphere Hardening Guide, PCI and HIPAA.
Improvements to Product Content
- New OOTB dashboards to optimise performance + cost.
- vSAN dashboards have been enhanced to now include vSAN KPI’s and costing capabilities.
- Refreshed OOTB reports which cover multiple use cases for reporting health, performance, inventory, capacity, utilization and reclamation.
- Enhancements to views and symptoms which lead to simplified troubleshooting and analysis.
IMPORTANT:
Due to the significant changes in vRealize Operations 6.7, you should be aware of the following:
Several capacity metrics, sub-badges at an object level, OOTB views, dashboards and alerts have been deprecated.
- These metrics have been identified after working with many customers, field experts and internal VMware experts including myself who carried out analysis with 20+ customers to select the right metrics to be enabled OOTB and to either disable or remove others which are not being used.
- To check if you will be affected by any of these deprecated metrics, there is a pre-upgrade assessment tool which has been developed, this can be run before the upgrade to evaluate & mitigate the impact to your existing views, dashboards and alerts.
- Once you run the tool you will be presented with an HTML report which shows you where you will be affected and a link to what the recommended replacement metric or action is. You can use these recommendations to make changes to your custom content either before or after the upgrade to vRealize Operations 6.7.
Here is the list of Discontinued / Disabled Content and Replacement Recommendations in vRealize Operations 6.7:
http://partnerweb.vmware.com/programs/vrops/DeprecatedContent.html
Note: This content is subject to change so check back here regularly.
- What-if planning scenarios to add capacity functionality has been deprecated, along with the ability to reserve capacity at a cluster level for a given project.
- Option to calculate Capacity Remaining and Time Remaining based on demand vs allocation model has been deprecated. By default, the product now shows capacity analytics based on VM demand.
- Management Pack for VMware Configuration Manager has been deprecated. New simplified compliance pages and refreshed dashboards have been added to assess compliance against vSphere Security, PCI, HIPAA benchmarks.
If you think any of these changes affect you then you may need to consider if you should upgrade to vROps 6.7 or not.
Stay tuned for further content specific to vRealize Operations Manager 6.7.
Thanks for reading and please feel free to leave a comment or message me on twitter (@lukaswinn) if you found this article useful.
-Lukas
lukaswinn.net 