vROps Management Pack for Storage Devices 6.0.2 is GA

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Today sees the release of the vRealize Operations Management Pack for Storage Devices (MPSD) version 6.0.2. This is exciting for me as it means that vROps now has management and monitoring features for Virtual SAN 6.0.  The management pack comes with a set of default dashboards for Virtual SAN clusters, as well as the ability to monitor and create proactive alerts/notifications based on VSAN events.

I took the vROps Management Pack for a spin a little while back, and used it on my own lab cluster. Included below are a few of the features that it has.

Troubleshooting dashboard

This is the first of the dashboards specifically composed for VSAN (click on it to enlarge). From here, you can get an overall view of the state of the VSAN Cluster. It is also a great view to see the relationships between each of the components that are present in the cluster, from hosts down to disk groups, and the flash and magnetic disk devices in the disk group. On the right hand side, there is a list of health issues (if present) as well as alerts that are relevant to VSAN.

MPDS 1Entity Usage dashboard

This is another useful dashboard, and provides detailed latency and bandwidth figures across controllers, flash devices and magnetic disks. Useful for narrowing down any bottlenecks in the system:

MPSD 3Cluster Usage dashboard

One other dashboard that I wanted to call out is the Cluster Usage dashboard. This displays capacity, throughput, latency and any errors at an upper layer (cluster) level as opposed to low-level information. Useful for an overall picture of the cluster’s health.

Other dashboards include a heat map display that can be configured to examine multiple different metrics, as well as a device insight dashboard which leverages SMART to display low-level information on devices such as wear leveling and reallocated sector count on SSDs.

Of course, administrator can also create custom dashboards in vROps to display specific metrics that they feel are interesting. We already have customers, who had early access to the MPSD, doing this.

Alerts

vROps Management Pack also comes with a plethora of built-in events related to VSAN. Not only that, but when an alert is raised, it can be clicked on to reveal some remedial actions that an administrator might take. A sample selection of alerts are shown below:

MPSD eventsAnd of course, with the deep integration between vROps and vCenter server, these alerts will also bubble up in the vSphere Web Client UI under Monitor > Health:

MPSD events in VCWith this new version of MPSD for vROps, couple with the VSAN Health Check plugin, customers have even more tools at their disposal to monitor the health of a VSAN cluster, and troubleshoot issues in the event of something going wrong.

My colleague Rawlinson has more details on his blog here, including a demo of vROps MPSD in action on VSAN. MPSD download can be found on the VMware Solutions Exchange by clicking here.

Published by Cormac

5 Replies to “vROps Management Pack for Storage Devices 6.0.2 is GA”

  2. I installed Vsphere 6.0 and had to uninstall it and go back in panic to version 5.5. I have several VMs with sound, where I included this in the *.vmx
    sound.present = “TRUE”
    sound.allowGuestConnectionControl = “TRUE”
    sound.autoDetect = “TRUE”
    sound.virtualDev = “hdaudio”
    sound.fileName = “-1”
    sound.present = “TRUE”
    It turns out that this does not work anymore, and there is NO workaround on the Internet. It means that thousands of companies are not able to upgrade or, worse, like in my case, we do upgrade and then need to go back and waste hours of manpower. Has somebody lost their mind? Vmware might be becoming a second Microsoft, a company that routinely plays these tricks on the customers. We need sound in virtual machines. Why remove it?

  3. Can someone share a link to a document that explains how to **Uninstall** this specific pack? (which actually works…)

    It does not work at all in my environment (VSAN 6 only on 6.0.0b). It is collecting it says, but all its dashboard have been, and still are completely empty. No errors reported but it’s just all empty.
    I’m fed up trying to get it to work. I tried so much, even re-install and re-configure etc. etc.

    What i tried so far:
    Under “Solutions” I disabled the collection process and when I select the Pack and click on “Delete all adapter instances and related objects” it asks if i’m sure i want to delete it. I say yes. And that it’s. It’s still there. I can repeat that until the end of time. It simply does not go away.

    1. Steven, I strongly recommend you open an SR with GSS for this issue (either to figure out why it is not collecting, or removing the pak completely)

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