#xtraseady

By Simon Eady

Big IT failures and problems always seem to make the news and it often takes a big ‘real world’ problem for people to realise the importance that IT has within almost every sector.

And while not all is revealed to the public eye as to how or why such IT failures occur – nor may they really care as long as their service continues to work – it is safe to say that no company wants to be the one that incurs an IT failure or problem, as this can directly affect the way they’re perceived by staff, existing and prospective customers.

So, the question is, how can they mitigate and protect against it from happening?

Well, this isn’t just about having the right IT infrastructure in place – although of course that helps - but it is about monitoring that IT infrastructure. Often, businesses may neglect monitoring their infrastructure due to budget constraints or lack of interest, but it can very quickly become a priority when a serious issue occurs.

Without careful monitoring of IT infrastructure, downtime and critical issues can become increasingly more likely causing serious impact to the business. Being pro-active and making sure you have a monitoring system in place can help you be better prepared and maximise the efficiency of your IT infrastructure.

Key reasons for monitoring

There are a number of benefits for organisations from monitoring IT infrastructure beyond just detecting issues.

Troubleshooting

By monitoring IT infrastructure, potential issues can be identified and detected before they become critical and result in downtime. A good monitoring system can enable you to detect and resolve issues before any users get affected.

Reporting

A monitoring system gives you complete visibility of your IT infrastructure so can help provide useful metrics and analytics. Regular reporting can help you gain insights into a number of areas such as identifying trends, usage levels, network/system availability.

Efficiency

With issue detection and troubleshooting taking less time with a monitoring system, IT resources can be freed up to focus on core infrastructure and IT services and service delivery.

 vROps as a monitoring tool

When it comes to monitoring there are a number of tools and solutions available, in my experience working in this area, I’m finding that many organisations are opting for VMware vRealize® Operations™ Manager (vROps) as their preferred monitoring tool for the entire estate, whether it be Virtual or Physical.

vROps is VMware’s operations management and monitoring product that enables organisations to consolidate multiple tools as they strive to achieve that holy grail of getting a single source of truth that covers the whole estate.

Built with resilience in mind, coming with built-in features such as High Availability to help protect against an analytics cluster node failure, vROps also offers tremendous extensibility by way of management packs via VMware, Blue Medora vROps integration, or the vendor of the product that you want to monitor.

What’s more, VMware (and Blue Medora integration packs) also allow users to hook in their hybrid cloud estate, so whether you have applications or workloads in Azure or AWS, you can centrally monitor and alert effectively.

vROps provides a whole host of benefits to organisations as a comprehensive solution for IT infrastructure monitoring, including:

Automation – vROps can not only alert but also remediate, either manually via prompts or automatically, both using hook ins to vCenter and vRO

Customisation – whether it be dashboards or reports, customers can tailor vROps to suit their specific needs

Capacity planning – with the projects feature you can present or change scenarios to vROps and it will give you instant feedback on the impact it would have risk-based alerts - vROps can forewarn people of a potential issue with regards to disk growth, or usage of CPU/RAM/LAN

Effective and concise alerting – using the ability to filter out all the background noise and understand what is really going on in the estate

Scalability – vROps can monitor a vast number of objects

Workload placement – ensuring your workloads are accurately and effectively placed maximising your ROI on your hardware and ensuring your end users are getting the resources they need.

In addition to all the business benefits, vROps also has a strong user community that can offer tips, tricks and guidance to get the most out of vROps.

 Final thoughts

The bottom line is, businesses want to quickly know where there is an issue and what caused it, but perhaps more importantly, where an issue may be initiating so that it can be stopped before it becomes serious. Monitoring IT infrastructure and vROps can help businesses achieve this, or at the very least give a firm handle on what is happening and why, so issues, problems and failures can be addressed quickly and efficiently.

If you want to know more about how you can maximise the efficiency of your IT infrastructure and monitoring solutions, then Xtravirt can help. We provide advisory, design and implementation services to create the right solution for your organisation. Contact us and we’d be happy to use our wealth of knowledge and experience to assist you.  

About the Author

Simon Eady joined the Xtravirt consulting team in October 2014. He has wide ranging IT experience including Virtual Infrastructure design and implementation, while currently specialising in vRealize Operations and vRealize Automation. He was awarded VMware vExpert 2018, is a leader of the South West UK VMUG Group and is a graduate of the VMware Advanced Architecture Course 2018.

About Xtravirt

Xtravirt are an experienced consulting firm dedicated to delivering outcomes to help customers solve their IT challenges. We design and build strategies to help customers unlock the full potential of cloud, datacentre and workspace technology.

We are the VMware Global and EMEA Professional Services partner of the year.

by Simon Eady

Having missed VMworld 2016, I was looking forward to attending this year, especially after the big announcements from the 2016 events and VMworld US 2017.

Hardly surprising, VMware on AWS featured heavily and the available sessions to attend were numerous. But, due to the current and future projects I’m engaged with, my primary focus this time was on vRealize Operations and vRealize Automation.

Of all the key note announcements made, the HCX one was the most impressive. Available in late 2017 via IBM and OVH, HCX will allow you to connect your private cloud to any VMware cloud vendor, allowing you to seamlessly move your apps easily into the cloud and back.

I’ve heard it said that whoever nails the flexibility of moving around in the cloud will be a huge success. So, I believe HCX will be a very attractive offering to those businesses looking for an option to easily “burst” into the cloud when required.

The first session I attended was “How to build a software defined DR practice with vSAN and SRM”. This was very useful as nearly every customer I have visited in the past 12 months was using either one or both products so it was good to understand how they can be used together with great effect.

Some key take-aways from the session were:

vSphere Replication is free with Essentials Plus and higher

vSphere Replication is not limited to just SRM you can get a little creative with it if you wish

The SRM Roadmap finally as an appliance on it

For SRM to work the products need to be the same version

SRM supports vSAN stretched clusters, this is great to be able to move VMs to other DCs in separate vCenters (migration workflows)

vSAN Stretched Cluster requires 5ms RTT 1-Gbe (works on L2 and L3 networks) a 3rd site is needed for the witness server.

 Another area I am upskilling in is PowerShell/PowerCLI so it was beneficial to get along to the “Introduction to the PowerCLI Repository” session presented by Kyle Ruddy. If automation and daily operations is your thing, then you need to get your head into Powershell and PowerCLI ASAP.

So why Powershell/PowerCLI? Well, in this rapidly changing industry the cloud is king and it functions via automation and there are many products and languages that enable this. From a VMware point of view, PowerCLI is extremely powerful and fortunately relatively straight forward to learn (if you invest some time). The bonus here is that Powershell (which is what PowerCLI sits on) works very nicely with Azure, so if you can get competent with it you will effectively be killing 2 birds with one stone. If you are a sysadmin or consultant and have not yet made the jump to learning a language then now is the time. Staying relevant and valuable as an IT professional, and learning a language is key because automation has arrived and it is here to stay.

As someone who does not personally find coding easy, I have found a great deal of value from learning it, however, I have also found it to be a reasonable learning curve.

A key feature of VMworld events are the Design Workshops and this year I was fortunate to be invited to attend a vRealize Operations Design Workshop. While the content is under an NDA I can say that VMware have really got a good handle on getting feedback from experts and customers alike. I thoroughly enjoyed the workshop and am really looking forward to what comes next for the product. On a similar product theme, I was also invited to attend a TAM session focused on vROps.

Taking a break from the main sessions, I had my first experience of a hackathon. It was an excellent learning experience as well as a chance to meet new people from the wider vCommunity. The team I was a part of was called “one pod to rule them all” which focused on automating the deployment of various VMware products, to which we made some good progress but the 4 hours quickly disappeared. My key take-away from this, is that the Hackathon is a fun learning exercise along with being a great way to meet new people. So, if you have an opportunity to attend a hackathon near you, I would strongly encourage you to try it out.

The solutions exchange AKA the vendor hall provided another aspect to VMworld. I always enjoy wandering around the solutions exchange as I like to see what is new from the vendors and it helps get a feel for where the market place is right now. I made sure I visited a few vendors with whom I have worked with in the past and present, such as Blue Medora but also took time to check out anything new that caught my eye. This year I found a product and company called Morpheus. If you are looking at implementing your own in house and hybrid cloud solution they are very much worth a look.

For anyone that has attended before you will (I hope) be keenly aware of the fantastic networking opportunities at the conference and of course the evening activities.  If I was not in a session or in the Solutions Exchange, then I spent most of my time in the VMTN area (community’s area) catching up with and meeting new people from the wider vCommunity. I have no doubt in my mind that one of the huge strengths to the VMware eco-system is the community behind it. Having the VMTN lounge apart of the vBrownbag stage was a genius idea as you could blog, chat, network and learn all at the same time.

For me personally, aside from the sessions, the key strength to VMworld is the networking component. It is what you make of it, so getting involved and meeting people brings such great value to the event.

Rounding up, it was an excellent VMworld, good solid announcements and superb sessions to attend and as always, the networking and evening events were absolutely worth the trip.

To find out more about how your organisation can benefit from VMware products and solutions, please contact us and we’ll be happy to use our wealth of knowledge and experience to assist you.

**About the Author **

by Simon Eady

Having been a VMUG member for several years and now a VMUG leader I have seen the value of being involved in this community and attending the meetings/events/conferences.

So why do I think you should you go?

If you are using VMware technologies/products in your workplace or you are regularly consulting on VMware products, the VMUG events are in my opinion an invaluable resource. It simply doesn’t matter what experience/knowledge you have of the products, whether you are very new to virtualization or an old hand I  guarantee you will come away from any VMUG meeting having learned something useful or dare I say been a great source/help to others whom you have met and networked with. Each VMUG meeting is usually broken down into sessions, some of them vendor specific (but still relating to virtualization) while others are community led.

Community Sessions

Community led sessions are a fantastic opportunity to see how your peers are using VMware (or related) products in the real world. They are always very well informed, unbiased and in some cases very frank! More often than not you will be able to gleam those really useful nuggets of information you were hoping for which will help you should you ever need to look at or deploy any given product. There isn’t any sales fluff, you are quite literally hearing it from guys who have carried out installs, deployments, tackled issues and problems and in some cases have come up with ingenious ways to get the most from the product.

Vendor Sessions

I can almost hear your eyes rolling at the thought of sitting through a vendor session but I will ask you to re-consider. The vendor sessions are very specific with regards to their product and where it sits in our area of interest (virtualization), there is always the opportunity for Q&A not just in the session but afterwards and it can be a great chance to learn something new and discover some new tech that may well be what you have been looking for. The above are the most common sessions but frequently you will also come across the following type of sessions.

Roundtable sessions

Usually limited in the number of people who can attend, these sessions often focus on a particular subject matter hosted by very knowledgeable community members.

“Rockstar” sessions

Probably not termed in such a fashion but it is usually a session where someone who is considered a “rockstar” in the VMware world/community is presenting on their specialist subject matter. These are usually very popular and for good reason, these guys didn’t become rockstars for nothing!

Lab/training workshops