At VMworld 2018, Pat Gelsinger made reference to a project that was looking to use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to create self driving operations for the vSphere stack. At VMworld 2019 last week, we were given a tech preview of the first iteration of this effort, called Project Magna. There were a number of VMworld break-out sessions dedicated to this effort, and I will reference them near the end of this post. However, this first tech preview is focused solely on hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), namely vSAN. It is an interesting choice to start with, since we position vSAN as…
Regular readers will know that I have been spending quite a bit of time recently looking at Kubernetes running on vSphere. I’ve written a number of posts on the storage side of things, which you can read here as part of my 101 series. I also posted about how you can setup vRealize Operations Manager 7.5 and add the Management Pack for Container Monitoring. This provide some really good dashboards for examining the state of your K8s clusters, as well as detailed breakdowns into K8s node VM health and performance (CPU, Memory, DIsk IO). Not only that, but you can…
Very short post – simply to highlight an issue I came across and could not find any external reference to. I added a new adapter to my vRealize Operations Manager 7.5 to monitor my NSX-T 2.3.1 deployment. The adapter was the NSX-T 2.0 Adapter. Soon after configuring it to communicate to my NSX Manager, the Collection Status for the adapter changed to Object down and the Adapter Status changes to Collection Failed. Initially I thought it as some interoperability issue, but that wasn’t the case. I went ahead and looked at the dashboard, and it reported that the Adapter Instance…
The vROps Management Pack for Container Monitoring is something that I had been meaning to install and configure for a while now, but I just haven’t had a chance until very recently. If you didn’t know. VMware’s vRealize Operations has a Management Pack for Container Monitoring. This includes adapters for both the Pivotal Container Service (PKS) as well as Kubernetes. In my environment I had already deployed PKS which I was then using for deploying my Kubernetes clusters. I found the official documentation a little light on what exact information was required for both the PKS Adapter and the Kubernetes…
At VMworld last year, Duncan Epping and I presented on the power of Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM for short). You can find all of the slides and recordings here. One of the demos we used in the presentation was deploying virtual machines via vRealize Automation, and showing how to consume a storage policy on vSAN. This was using a vRealize Automation plugin, and to be honest, it was a little bit challenging to get it to work. And it wasn’t really a VMware plugin per-se, but something developed by our field team. Today, I’m pleased to announce that we…
Last month we announced the release of a new vROps Management Pack specifically for vSAN. Previously the vSAN Management Pack was bundled with the MPSD – Management Pack for Storage Devices. I wrote about this when it entered beta, way back in 2015. Well, for those customers who are only interested in monitoring vSAN, and didn’t want all the other parts of the MPSD, the new vSAN Management Pack is now a stand-alone offering, so no MPSD required. This new vSAN Management Pack focuses on 3 main areas of vSAN: (1) Health and Availability, (2) Performance Analysis and (3) Capacity…
Attention VSAN users. A new Log Insight content pack has just been released specifically for Virtual SAN. For those of you not familiar with Log Insight, this product does automated log management through log analytics, aggregation and search. It allows administrators to analyze terabytes of logs, perform smart parsing to discover structure in unstructured data, and enable interactive, real-time search and analytics through a GUI-based, easy to use interface.