VMware Cloud Community
admin
Immortal
Immortal

vCenter Operations is now live!

Download a 60-day trial here and check out a great blog post by Eric Sloof here.

Enjoy!

Reply
0 Kudos
17 Replies
schepp
Leadership
Leadership

Thanks. It looks really nice.

Too bad I just had to spend our VMware money for the SnS renewals Smiley Wink

Btw I think your link is not up to date anymore, mklx01. Here's the new one:

http://www.vmware.com/go/try-vcenter-ops

Reply
0 Kudos
idle-jam
Immortal
Immortal

it's cool and i'm wondering what's the positioning between appspeed and vcenter operation.

Reply
0 Kudos
admin
Immortal
Immortal

Thanks for pointing out the broken link. I fixed it in the original post.

Reply
0 Kudos
esloof
Expert
Expert

Thanks for the mention 🙂

Reply
0 Kudos
Thijs201110141
Contributor
Contributor

It looks nice!

Trying it now, but can't get to the webinterface after copying the ip address from the summary.

No topics to find yet about problems, anyone suggestions?

Reply
0 Kudos
nava_thulasi39

Thanks mklx01 & Eric.

If you find this or any other answer useful please consider awarding points by marking the answer correct or helpful
Reply
0 Kudos
ynguldyn
Contributor
Contributor

The appliance seems to be very particular about DNS in the environment where it runs. Ours is not perfect, so I found two issues in one day of testing.

First, if you let the appliance use DHCP, you need to make sure that the name it will receive will be resolvable. Our DHCP and DNS are somewhat disconnected, and the appliance couldn't establish a connection to itself. The visible symptom was the interface was stuck on the initial configuration message. The simplest solution I could think of was give the appliance a static IP and create an A record for it in our DNS system, then reboot.

Second, you need to make sure that the IP address of your client system has correct reverse DNS. The appliance will take the IP, reverse resolve it to a name, then resolve the name to an IP. If the resulting IP doesn't match the original one, all connections will be refused (your browser will say "connection reset" or something like that; the plugin will be disabled with a connection error message). This behavior is dictated by the "ALL : KNOWN" line in /etc/hosts.allow on the appliance. To fix, change it to "ALL : ALL"

[rant]

For the life of me, I can't understand why VMware decided to tweak hosts.allow. Reverse DNS problems are extremely widespread in Windows environments, where multitudes of DHCP clients come and go, dynamically registering their names in DNS, which then remain there for (relative) ages. Windows DNS does pick up trash, but that's not a continuous and immediate process. Problems are virtually guaranteed. And this adds zero security to the system. VMware dev is yet to hear from their tech support. And if they're smart, the next build will have hosts.allow changed.

[/rant]

Reply
0 Kudos
admin
Immortal
Immortal

So the url should be as follows

https://<IP>/adminMain.action

Then

1 Click the

Setup tab.

2 In the Register vCenter Server pane, click

Update.

The vCenter Server Info window appears.

3 Type a descriptive name to use for the vCenter Server system in the vCenter Operations Standard view.

This name is for your reference when you monitor the vCenter Server system and does not affect the object

in the actual virtual infrastructure.

4 Type the IP address or fully qualified domain name of the vCenter Server system to monitor and from

which to collect information.

5 Type the registration credentials for vCenter Operations Standard to use when connecting to the vCenter

Server system.

The user you provide must have administrator privileges on the vCenter Server system.

6 Type the collection credentials for vCenter Operations Standard to use when collecting data from vCenter

Server objects.

You can use the same registration credentials that access all of the vCenter Server objects or limited

credentials for a subset of the inventory.

7 (Optional) To check if vCenter Operations Standard can connect to the vCenter Server system, click

Test

.

A message appears with information on the test result.

8 Click

Save to apply the changes.

I hope this helps.

Reply
0 Kudos
admin
Immortal
Immortal

ynguldyn wrote:


For the life of me, I can't understand why VMware decided to tweak hosts.allow. Reverse DNS problems are extremely widespread in Windows environments, where multitudes of DHCP clients come and go, dynamically registering their names in DNS, which then remain there for (relative) ages. Windows DNS does pick up trash, but that's not a continuous and immediate process. Problems are virtually guaranteed. And this adds zero security to the system. VMware dev is yet to hear from their tech support. And if they're smart, the next build will have hosts.allow changed.

Sorry about that, ynguldyn!

Our underlying OS distribution is SuSE Linux Enterprise 11.0, and this is how they ship the file (apparently for security reasons, probably driven by popular security scanning tools in the industry).  This is a delicate balance that we have to strike here - between usefulness and needlessly tripping these scanners.

We'll take a close look at what we can do to improve this side of the configuration experience. Thanks for the valuable feedback!

Reply
0 Kudos
TristanT
Contributor
Contributor

I've deployed vCtr Ops Std in a customer environment.  Workload numbers appear valid but every managed object appears to have Health of 100 and Capacity of 100.  The system has been online and connected to vCenter for over 6 hours.  Do we need to give it more time before we get accurate Health and Capacity numbers?

Thanks so much!

When will we be able to post new discussions in this forum?

Reply
0 Kudos
admin
Immortal
Immortal

Tristan Todd wrote:

I've deployed vCtr Ops Std in a customer environment.  Workload numbers appear valid but every managed object appears to have Health of 100 and Capacity of 100.  The system has been online and connected to vCenter for over 6 hours.  Do we need to give it more time before we get accurate Health and Capacity numbers?


Is there any particular reason you think the health should be less than 100? And "capacity=100" also means that we think that none of your VMs is in imminent danger of "running out of capacity" (based on whatever projections we can make based on what we've collected).

The latter figure will become more reliable the more data we collect.  For Health, we make predictions based on both static criteria (for which we can detect any issues almost immediately), and based on the long-term behavior of the VM (for which, of course, we need to collect data for some time and analyze it, to determine what is "normal" behavior for that VM).

But an initial reading of 100 for capacity and health is not uncommon or unnatural.

When will we be able to post new discussions in this forum?

I've passed on this question to the forum owners.

Reply
0 Kudos
admin
Immortal
Immortal

Tristan: it looks like the forum issue has been fixed. If you log out and log in again, you should be able to see a new “Create a New Discussion” link under Actions.

Reply
0 Kudos
Jon_Burt
Contributor
Contributor

Are there plans to release a trial of the Enterprise edition, the current trial seems to be the Advanced version, I am particularly interested in the integration with third party Management Systems

Reply
0 Kudos
admin
Immortal
Immortal

The Enterprise edition is currently available only per request. I suggest you reach out to your local VMware team and possibly set up a POC. Since Standard and Advanced are delivered as virtual appliances targeting vSphere-only environments, they're far quicker to deploy and get up and running.

Reply
0 Kudos
ProPenguin
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

What does this product actually do?  Reading over the information page all I could gather is that it gives me an enhanced, automated, optimal, makes me breakfast, visual of a cloud.  I think the sales people go a little over board on the descriptions.  I would like an actual tech person to write something about the products.

Reply
0 Kudos
doverbeek
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Hi ProPenguin,

There are some really good videos that walk you through the product and what it does.  It a is very different so I found them useful.  Also, they are done by the lead architect so minimal marketing fluff.  Smiley Happy

Reply
0 Kudos
Chhavi
Contributor
Contributor

Hello mklx01,

I have seen videos for the standard edition. Do we have any such demo for Enterprise as well.

There are a lot of features that are there in Ent edition and not in Std.

Regards,

Chhavi

Reply
0 Kudos