I wrote about what’s new in vROps 6 and about the deployment of the virtual appliance. I also described how to migrate the data from the old vCOps vApp. Part 3 covers the decommission of the old vApp.

Enter the IP or FQDN of your UI VM into the browser. Login as admin into the administration UI.

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Before the vApp can be removed, the vCOps needs to be unregistered from the vCenter. Click “Unregister”.

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A confirmation pop-up appears. Click “Yes”.

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The process can take some time, depending on your environment. In my case the unregistration took about 5 minutes.

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That’s it. After the successful unregistration, the vApp can be shutdown and removed from the vCenter. Say good bye and enjoy your new vROps 6.0!

Some users complained about the absence of the Health Widget in the vSphere Web Client, after the removal of the old vCOps. Michael White (@mwVme) posted the solution: vSphere Web Client Health State Widget has errors after vR Ops Migration? Thanks to Michael for sharing this!

Part 1 of this series has covered a short overview over vRealize Operations Manager 6.0 and the initial deployment of the virtual appliance. Now it’s time to bring it to life.

Open a browser and enter the IP of your newly deployed vROps appliance. You will get this nice initial setup screen. “New Installation” is always a good start. Click “New Installation”.

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Within five little steps, the configuration of vROps will be done. You may have noticed the “Migrate Data” icon on the right of the screenshot. This will be important later. Start with clicking “Next”.

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Enter the password for the build-in administrator account and click “Next”.

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I really liked part: Choose Certificate. No command line, no complex knowledge base articles. Simply choose “Install a certificate” and point the installer to a valid certificate. You can replace the certificate later. Because of this, I’ve chosen “Use the default certificate” at this point.

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Enter the name of the master node and a valid NTP server. In my case, the NTP server is my Active Directory Domain Controller.

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Complete the initial setup by clicking “Finish”.

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Now the vROps services must be started. Click “Start vRealize Operations Manager”. The pop up can be answered with “Yes”.

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Log in with “admin” and the password you’ve chosen at the beginning of the initial setup.

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Because I already had a vCOps running in my lab, I’ve chosen “Import Environment”. This selection allows you to import the data from your current vCOps vApp. Click “Next”.

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Carefully read the EULA, enable the checkbox and click “Next”.

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Now you have to add a license key. I used my vExpert vCloud Suite key.

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Enter the IP address or the FQDN of your current vCOps UI VM. A pop-up appears that informs you, that an agent is pushed to the VM. This step takes about 5 minutes to finish. Click “Next”.

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You can add additional solutions at this point. This wasn’t necessary in my case. Click “Next”.

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Everything’s fine. Simply click “Finish” and relax.

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Now the data is imported. Depending on your resources and the amount of data, this step can take some time. In my case this step took about 10 minutes to finish.

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Congratulations! That’s it. Easy, isn’t it? Now you can add additional nodes, e.g. a replica node or additional data nodes.

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The migration process is really easy and straightforward. The database is the most valuable. Because of this, I strongly recommend to migrate the data from your current vCOps environment.

But what to do with the old vCOps vApp? It’s still active and consumes resources from your vSphere cluster. I covered this in part 3 of this series.

VMware presented the vRealize Operations Manager 6.0 at the VMworld 2014 in Barcelona. In early december, vROps was available for download.

vROps 6.0 is the successor of VMwares IT Operations Management suite vCenter Operations Manager, or vCOps. VMware has aligned the naming scheme with other products, so this release is the first release under the new brand vRealize.

VMware has made some major improvements to this release. One of the biggest advantages is the ability to scale-out. In prior releases you had to deploy multiple vApps to scale. Now you can add additional vROps instances to a cluster. These appliances provide computing resources, as well as redundancy. This allows you to scale beyond the limits of vCOps 5. Redundancy is provided by a concept which is based on master, replica and data nodes. The fist node in a vROps deployment is the master node. By adding a replica node, you can add redundancy for the case that the master node fails. Master and replica node work in a active/ standby relationship. The data nodes are the secret behind the scalability of vROps. A data node has only one task to perform: Collect data based on the assigned adapter.

VMware has also improved the user interface (UI). There is no need anymore to switch between different UIs. The management, administration and customer UI has been consolidated into a single UI. The first UI access after the initial deployment is redirected to a first-time wizard. This wizard helps you to deploy vROps, or to migrate your vCOps environment. In addition to the UI changes, VMware has added RBAC to vROps to simplify user access management.

When talking about the UI, it’s only a small step to the data visualization and reporting. The visualization of collected data is one of the greatest features of vCOps/ vROps. Only data visualization makes it possible to get a quick oversight over the current health of the IT infrastructure. Prior version of vROps included reports and some fixed dashboards. With the current release, vROps provides fully configurable reports and dashboards with the ability to include any data source, object or metric. Just think about the opportunities: You can build reports or dashboards across the whole stack, from the infrastructure to the application.

Smart Alerts provide a way to trigger an alarm, when multiple symptoms are observed. This is much more flexible than the old alarms you know from vCOps. But even a dynamic threshold may be too inflexible in certain cases. Smart Alerts add more intelligence to the alarming system. When using smart alerts, an alert is triggert when multiple symptoms are observed. Now you know that something is wrong in your datacenter. But how can you solve this? vROps is able to execute basics operations as a reaction to a smart alert. If you need more advanced reactions, vROps can utilize vRealize Orchestrator to accomplish this. Your datacenter will heal itself.

The capacity management was improved. The well known “Demand & Allocation” based capacity model hasn’t changed, but it’s now not limited to vSphere objects. The capacity management can now include all monitored objects. VMware also improved the the “what-if”-analysis. This feature was now extended and is now aware of projects. With this feature, you can add future hardware purchases into a “what-if”-analysis.

VMware dramatically improved the analysis and monitoring of the storage subsystem. Unified Storage Visibility can show you the correlation between applications and your underlying storage infrastructure in an End-2-End manner.

The licensing was simplified. Customers can now install multiple editions in the same vROps deployment. This enables customers to deploy a-la-carte and suite licenses together, e.g. vCloud Suite Standard, vSOM Standard and vROps Standard together in one deployment. You can’t deploy Standard with either an Advanced or Enterprise, e.g. vCloud Site Standard and vSOM Advanced or vROps Advanced/ Enterprise.

The deployment process

You can deploy vROps using a virtual appliance or on top of RHEL or Windows using suitable installation packages. I would always prefer the appliance deployment. A big advantage is, that the new vROps appliance is a single appliance, not a vApp. Especially in environments without DRS deploying the vCOps vApp was pain. You can deploy vROps on every ESX/ESXi host running version 4.0 or later that is managed by a VMware vCenter Server 4.0 Update 2 or later.

I used the good old C# client to deploy the appliance. ;) Start with selecting “Deploy a OVF Template” from the vSphere client.

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Simply click “Next” to get to the EULA.

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Carefully read the EULA and click “Accept”. Then click “Next”.

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Enter a new name for the vROps appliance or accept the default name. Select a location for the VM.

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Select the configuration. If your environment consists of equal or less 2000 VMs, select “small”. In this case the appliance will configured with 4 vCPUs and 16 GB memory. This is equal to the resources of the old vCOps vApp construct.

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Select the host or the cluster into the vROps appliance should be deployed. I selected my management host.

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Select a resource pool if you have RPs configured.

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I deploy my VMs always thin-provisioned in my lab. Select an appropriate disk format for your deployment.

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Choose the port-group to which the appliance should be connected. In my case it’s my infrastructure port-group.

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Now we need to add IP, subnet, gateway, DNS and time zone. Make sure that this applies to the port-group you have chosen one step earlier.

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Double check your settings and click “finish”.

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Depending on your equipment, wait a couple of seconds, get yourself a coffee or go out for a walk. Congratulations, it’s a vROps!

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At this point is the initial deployment finished and we can proceed further. As you maybe noticed, there was already a vCOps deployed in my lab. At this point a vCOps 5.8.x and a vROps 6.0 were running in my lab. Time to migrate vCOps to vROps. This process is covered in part 2 of this series.