Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
analysis, the option to save the chart data as an Excel spreadsheet is quite useful. The graphics
options are useful when you need to put the performance data into a report of some sort.
There's a lot of information exposed via vCenter Server's performance charts. We'll revisit
the performance charts again in the sections on monitoring specii c types of resources later in
this chapter. First we'll show you how vCenter Operations Manager can help you monitor and
troubleshoot your vSphere environment.
Understanding vCenter Operations Manager
vCenter Operations (vC Ops) Manager is the primary component of the VMware vCenter
Operations Management Suite. This suite is designed to go hand in hand with not just vSphere
but VMware's whole vCloud suite of infrastructure products, providing additional management
capabilities on the operational side of things. The full enterprise version of vCenter Operations
Management Suite includes the following components:
◆
vCenter Operations Manager
vCenter Coni guration Manager
◆
vFabric Hyperic
◆
vCenter Infrastructure Navigator
◆
◆
vCenter Chargeback Manager
While we could write a whole book on the vC Ops suite, this topic is about vSphere, so
we will concentrate on just what's available to you for free without the need to purchase any-
thing else.
Installing vC Ops
The vC Ops Manager is a two-VM vApp that comes as a bundled Open Virtualization Format
(OVA) package and is a 1.4 GB download from VMware. All customers that have vSphere licens-
ing are able to download and install this product into Foundation mode without the need for a
license key. When operating in Foundation mode, vC Ops does not allow a lot of access to the
advanced features such as custom dashboards, root cause analysis, and automated workl ow
triggers or compliance views, but it does extend the functionality of the vSphere Web Client
somewhat. Next we'll show you how to install vC Ops, and then later we will explain the fea-
tures that are available with the Foundation edition.
Deploying the vC Ops vApp
This procedure is fairly straightforward and mirrors most appliance-based installs (like the one
performed for the vCenter Virtual Appliance in Chapter 3, “Installing and Coni guring vCen-
ter Server”), but we'll step you through the process in case you skipped to this section. We will
assume that you've already logged on to my.vmware.com and download the 1.4 GB OVA i le.
Here are the steps:
1.
Connect to a vCenter Server instance with the vSphere Web Client.
2.
Navigate to the Hosts And Clusters or VMs And Templates view.
