VMware Operations Manager provides a single pane of glass if you will for analytics and monitoring of your VMware powered software defined data center (SDDC). This includes VMware vSphere environment monitoring of hosts, VMs, storage, network, etc. It also has the ability to be extended for other VMware products such as vRA, vRO, Log Insight, NSX, AWS, etc. There are a lot of new features and enhancements to vRealize Operations Manager 6.5 including the following:
- Even more monitoring capabilities
- Increased scalability – increased memory and monitoring scope in the same environment as well as scale limitations are removed from predictive DRS
- Predictive DRS is a new feature of vSphere 6.5 allowing vROps to provide long-term forecast metrics in addition to the short-term placement of vSphere DRS
- Platform has been optimized to monitor even more with the same size appliance footprint
- There is a new XL size node that can monitor more objects and analyze more metrics
- You can now automatically upgrade the Endpoint Operations Agents
- There are new troubleshooting features in vROPs 6.5 including more correlation with logs and metrics with monitored objects
- New custom metric groups
- In vROPs 6.5 exports and imports are simplified and sharing between dashboards with vROPs installations is easier
- Better understanding by vROPs of private cloud costs and expenditures on public cloud resources with integration between vRealize Business for Cloud and vROPs
Deployment
The vRealize Operations Manager 6.5 install is available in two formats – either a virtual appliance that can be deployed within a vSphere environment or a Linux installation package to be installed on an existing RHEL installation. With vROPs 6.5, there is no longer a Windows installation of the appliance. Also, VMware has stated the RHEL installation will be deprecated moving forward as well.
VMware has shown in their roadmap of various products to be moving away from Windows installations and moving forward with Linux virtual appliances as their tool of choice for housing various products. This has been seen in current products including VMware vSphere vCenter Server.
Upgrade Process
The upgrade process is performed using a PAK file that is imported in the admin interface of an existing vRealize Operations Manager installation. Customers with recent versions of Realize Operations Manager (6.4, 6.3, 6.2, or 6.2.1) can upgrade directly to vRealize Operations Manager 6.5. Let’s take a look at how to upgrade to vRealize Operations Manager 6.5 from an existing 6.4 installation. The upgrade steps will follow this basic format:
- Obtain the upgrade PAK file from VMware – login to the VMware portal and download the PAK file for 6.5
- Login to the vROPs 6.X interface, upload the PAK file
- Perform the upgrade using the upgrade wizard
After obtaining your 6.5 upgrade PAK file, you need to navigate to your vROPs 6.X admin interface located at https://
This launches the Add Software Update wizard. Here we Browse to our PAK file that we download and choose the Upload button.
After the PAK file uploads we get a confirmation of the PAK file contents and file integrity. We also have the option before we proceed to Reset Default Content this will overwrite any modifications to the DEFAULT alert definitions, symptoms, recommendations, policy definitions, etc as the message states.
If you choose to overwrite the default content, we will receive a warning about the action and its repercussions.
Accept the license agreement.
Update information release information.
Finally, we come to the Install Software Update screen where we can begin the installation.
VROPs 6.5 goes through a series of preupdate checks that validate the update before it actually begins.
Once the upgrade begins, there will be a quick warning message that you may lose connectivity to the Web UI of vROPs.
If you refresh the browser you will get various messages about the interface not being available.
Finally, after a bit, you should be able to refresh your browser and gain access again to the login to vROPs. The admin interface will blink every few seconds as it will sit and auto refresh.
After a few minutes of the vROPs appliance completing the upgrade and bringing everything online, you should eventually see the Cluster Status as Online. The State should show as Running.
Thoughts
The vRealize Operations Manager product is a great way to gain valuable insights into your VMware vSphere software defined data center (SDDC) environment. The constant monitoring and analytics it provides are essential to keeping an eye on overall health as well as analytics to make good decisions on scaling hardware whether it be compute, network, or storage. The latest version, 6.5, builds on the power of the platform and provides even better monitoring and analytics with an even more efficient footprint and better performance.
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