Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
3.
Enter the details of your vCenter Server instance and click Next. You may be prompted to
accept the SSL certii cate; if so, click Yes.
4.
The vC Ops admin page will now prompt you to change both the default root and admin
passwords. For reference, the default password is admin for the admin account and the
default password is vmware for the root account. When they are both changed, click Next
to continue.
5.
You will now be prompted to enter the details for the vCenter Server instance you wish
to register with. Once all your details are entered, click Next to check the connection and
then again to continue to the i nal screen.
6.
On the i nal screen, the vC Ops admin page checks for linked mode vCenter Servers.
Click Finish to complete the vC Ops to vCenter registration process; this can take some
time depending on the number of objects managed by vCenter.
Now that vC Ops is registered with vCenter, it's time to reload the vCenter Web Client and
take a look at the changes that have taken place.
vC Ops Foundation Features
As stated earlier, vC Op has a large number of features, but most of them are disabled with the
Foundation version. There are four key features and capabilities that are turned on: Proactive
Smart Alerts, Intelligent Operations Groups, vSphere Health Monitoring, and Self-Learning
Performance Analytics.
The alerts within Proactive Smart Alerts are different from the standard alerts discussed
earlier in this chapter. This feature ties into the Self-learning Performance Analytics feature and
will begin to alert you when things are outside their normal operating levels. The Self-Learning
Performance Analytics feature will look at all the metrics captured over time and work out what
is considered “normal.” For example, your environment might have relatively steady workloads
during the day, but at 11 p.m., when the backups start, the storage and network utilization peak
considerably higher than during the day. With a traditional alert, your threshold would need to
take into consideration the peak for your backup window, but with self-learning analysis, vC
Ops knows that it is “normal” for high storage and network IO after 11 p.m. and will not alert
you. However, if during the day the IO peaked, an alert would still be generated.
Intelligent Operations Groups is a feature that allows you to create a group for monitoring
based on a ruleset. You can then apply this ruleset automatically to ensure that all objects are
added to the group according to the ruleset. After you add a group of objects to a group, you can
monitor them as a whole instead of just individually. The other handy feature with groups is
that you can nest groups within groups, allowing you to be as granular as necessary when cat-
egorizing objects for reporting.
vSphere Health Monitoring is the most visible feature that you will encounter with vC Ops
Foundation, adding a colorful badge to the Summary tab of some objects within the vCenter
Web Client. This badge will change color depending on the current health number displayed on
the badge, with 100 being the healthiest and 0 being very unhealthy, as shown in Figure 13.14.
But what is “health” you ask? Good question!
