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.
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:
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:
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.