vCenter Operations Management –

Troubleshooting Best Practices

Praveen Kannan, VMware

Frank Brix Pedersen, Arrow ECS Denmark

VCM4555

#VCM4555

Agenda

– Introduction to vCenter Operations Management Suite

– Myths

– vCenter Operations Manager Overview

– Dashboard and Badges

– Smart Alerts

– Related Events

– Metric Chart

– Heat Maps

– Custom Dash Board

– Q&A

2

VMware Cloud Management Portfolio

SIMPLE,

AUTOMATED

MANAGEMENT

FOR THE CLOUD

CLOUD SERVICE

PROVISIONING

CLOUD OPERATIONS

MANAGEMENT

CLOUD BUSINESS

MANAGEMENT

vCloud Automation

Center

vFabric Application

Director

vCenter

Operations

Management

Suite

vCenter Log

Insight

VMware

IT Business

Management

Suite

New!

vCenter Operations Management Suite

The VMware Cloud Operations Management Platform

Cloud Operations Console Extensibility

APIs

SDKs

3rd Party

adapters

Content

Packs

Helpdesk Integrated Management Disciplines

Performance Compliance Config Capacity Cost

Patented Analytics

App Visibility Logs Inventory Reporting Automation

Myths

– vCenter Operations Manager is only for the Enterprise with thousands

of virtual machines

– I am a vSphere Ninja – esxtop is the only tool I need. vCops got

nothing on me

5

Overview ‒ Features

– How much capacity have I left in my environment – when will I run out

of resources and what resource (storage, cpu, memory, network)

– Reclaim waste

– Proactive alerting

– Root Cause analysis

– Deep forensics analysis

– vCenter Operations Manager is a lot more than badges and it is a lot

more than we can cover in 50 minutes!

6

Dashboard

7

Is it healthy

= Health

Is it enough

= Risk

Is it

optimized =

Efficiency

Badges

8

Why Badges?

9

- vSphere has several hundreds counters per object

- Translate all of these numbers into Badges. Makes it easier to troubleshoot

without being a vSphere Expert

- If a Badge changes color figure out why and fix it

Health Changed – Related Events

10

vCops Integration in vCenter Web Client

11

vCops Integration in vCenter Web Client

12

vCenter Alarms versus vCops Smart Alerts

– vCenter uses static thresholds

– vCops uses dynamic thresholds

– Each object has its own thresholds calculated

13

Virtual Machine CPU Usage Alarm in vCenter

14

Warning

5 min > 75%

Alert

5 min > 90%

How often does

this actually report

a fault?

Dynamic Threshold in vCops

15

- Instead of static thresholds vCops uses dynamic thresholds (DT)

- No need to get alert if a machine is doing what it normally does

- How do we know normal behaviour is good behaviour??

Challenge: Details are Lost after 1 Hour

16

Challenge: Details are Lost after 1 Hour

17

vCenter Performance Graph Rollup

18

Real-time

Past Hour

Past Day

180 per hour

12 per hour

2 per hour

# data points

Challenge: Details are Lost after 1 Hour

19

What About Performance Graphs and ESXTOP?

20

- They are still relevant

- Use the right tool for the job

- These tools are complementary. All have their strenghts and weaknesses

ESXTOP vs. Perf. Graphs vs. Metric Chart

– Use ESXTOP for ”live” monitoring

– Use vCenter Performance Graphs for ”real-time” (past-hour)

– Use vCops Metric Chart for everything that is not ”real-time”

– Trendline, Dynamic Thresholds, Multiple Graph on one page. All counters

available, 5 minutes intervals.

21

ESXTOP vCenter

Past Hour

vCenter

Past Day

vCenter

Past Week

vCops Metric

Chart

Data

Interval

2-20 sec. 20 sec. 5 min. 30 min. 5 min.

Finding the Most IO Intensive Virtual Machines

- Users have reported slow disk performance

- You want to find out what virtual machines is saturating the storage array.

- You have 30 ESXi hosts, 40 datastores and 600 virtual machines.

Approximately 15 VMs per datastore.

- What do you do?

22

– Start 30 ESXTOP in batch mode and add all data to Excel?

– Open 600 Performance Graphs in vCenter and save them all?

– All of the data is in the vCenter Database, but not easily accessible!

– With vCops it is extremely easy to find this information.

The Key word is ”Heat Maps”

23

Finding the Most IO Intensive Virtual Machines

vCops Heat Maps

– A Heat Map is a graphical representation of one or two metrics.

– Use them to find ”Hot-Spots” in your environment

– One Metric defines the Size of the blocks in the map

– The second metric defines the Color of the blocks in the map

– Build your own or use the pre-defined

24

Build You Own Heat Map of Use the Pre-defined

25

- Build your own heat map

- Color by Read Latency and Size by Commands Per Second

Heatmap Showing IO Intensive VM’s

26

Custom Dashboards

- The Option to build your own views of the infrastructure

- Drag and drop

- Widgets

- Heat Maps

- Metric Graph

27

Why Customizable Dashboards

– Create different views of the infrastructure

– Storage View

– Network View

– vSphere View

– CPU analysis

– Memory analysis

– Datastore analysis

– My favorite: Forensics dashboard

28

Example: Storage Dashboards

29

Example: My Forensics Dashboard

30

Summary

– Use vCenter Operations Manager Metric Chart for insight into every

counter. No rollup

– Use the Badges in your troubleshooting methodology

– Use Smart Alerts to find out if the object is behaving normal

– Use Heat Maps to find hotspots

– Build your own views of your infrastructure with Custom Dashboards

31

Q&A

32

33

Other VMware Activities Related to This Session

HOL:

HOL-SDC-1301

Applied Cloud Operations

Group Discussions:

VCM1002-GD, VCM1004-GD

Cloud Operations with Hicham Mourad or Sam McBride

VCM4555

THANK YOU

vCenter Operations Management –

Troubleshooting Best Practices

Praveen Kannan, VMware

Frank Brix Pedersen, Arrow ECS Denmark

VCM4555

#VCM4555