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mclark
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Any way to limit the clusters/servers/VMs monitored?

I just brought up my Operations server with 50 VM licenses. I want to monitor my server infrastructure but not my View infrastructure. My vCenter server has a cluster for my servers and a cluster for my desktops. Since Operations is looking at everything, including my desktops, I have used up a lot of the 50 licenses. Is there any way to tell Operations not to montior certain clusters or servers? I looked around and didn't see anything, but I wanted to ask to be sure.

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gradinka
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yes, you can do that.

when registering VCOps to the VC, maybe you've noticed there are 2 sets of credentials - administrative and collector.

in your vcenter, create a new user (say, "VCOps_collector"), and gim him 'no access' to the cluster you don't want to monitor.

then use that user for the _collector_ credentials in VCOps. that way, it will not collect stats for the machines you don't want monitored.

you will still be able to see them in VCOps though, just there will be no stats for them

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gradinka
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yes, you can do that.

when registering VCOps to the VC, maybe you've noticed there are 2 sets of credentials - administrative and collector.

in your vcenter, create a new user (say, "VCOps_collector"), and gim him 'no access' to the cluster you don't want to monitor.

then use that user for the _collector_ credentials in VCOps. that way, it will not collect stats for the machines you don't want monitored.

you will still be able to see them in VCOps though, just there will be no stats for them

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mclark
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Great! I will give that a try. Thanks!

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vmroyale
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Hello.

This isn't pretty, but what if you only had a single cluster?  Could you limit the permissions on the VM level instead?

Brian Atkinson | vExpert | VMTN Moderator | Author of "VCP5-DCV VMware Certified Professional-Data Center Virtualization on vSphere 5.5 Study Guide: VCP-550" | @vmroyale | http://vmroyale.com
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AureusStone
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I can't see any reason why not.

But it is all very messy.  I hope they fix this up in the next version.

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kitcolbert
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I would strongly recommend against enabling access on a per-VM basis.  Remember that all these VMs are sharing the same underlying physical resources (standalone hosts or clusters, datastores, etc).  By collecting data on only a subset of those VMs running on those physical resources, you're leaving out critical information about how the system is performing and which VMs are causing problems.  For instance, you may notice some VMs are suffering performance issues.  However, the hosts look fine and no other VMs are taking up a lot of resources.  Well, if you're only monitoring a subset of VMs, then perhaps one of the VMs you're not monitoring is behaving badly?  You'll never know and thus you won't be able to root cause the problem.  Moreover, due to the fact that you're not monitoring various entities, certain aggregated metrics won't be computed correctly.

So, this is not an issue that we (VMware) can fix in our software.  It's a fundamental property of virtualization - the fact that physical resources are shared across VMs.  You need to be able to see all VMs sharing a particular physical resource in order to properly identify and troubleshoot performance problems.

Thus you really should provide access to full clusters or standalone hosts and not individual VMs within them.

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mclark
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But what VMware *CAN* fix in software is to allow the user to select which clusters (and maybe even ESX/ESXi servers) to monitor. I don't need the ability to deselect individual VMs, but as I stated in my original question, I do have two clusers on one vCenter, and I don't want VCO monitoring my View cluster and taking up licenses. If VCO allowed me to put a checkbox beside the clusters I wanted to monitor, I could de-select my View cluster while leaving my server cluster selected.

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admin
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Agreed.  This is definitely on our roadmap but we couldn't get it into this release.

mclark
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Thank you very much for this information. I am glad to know that you are looking at it.

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